By G眉ney I艧谋kara and

The recent paper by Gast贸n Nievas and Thomas Piketty, has gained substantial praise as well as criticism in a short period of time. Their empirical endeavor is impressive: the authors compiled and published a large dataset of balance of payments, including traded goods, services, direct transfers, and income from foreign labor and capital assets. This is a gruelling task in itself, and the dataset will certainly provide the foundations for many fruitful studies. For many academic economists, Nievas and Piketty鈥檚 own interpretation of the data constitutes one such great contribution for it puts forward, as the title of their paper suggests, that modern inequalities across regions and countries have their roots in colonial extraction and unequal exchange characterizing international trade until today. 

We on the other hand argue that the paper falls behind the state of perception of international inequalities in the Marxist tradition, dependency and structural economics literature. It (1) grasps global inequality as the outcome of a collection of distortions of the capitalist market mechanism rather than as an intrinsic feature of the latter; (2) consequently, proposes structural reforms to alter the power asymmetries in international trade, without an appropriate model of those power relations and why they exist in the first place; (3) lacks an adequate theory of production, value and price to understand the exchange relations at stake; and (4) artificially separates the term unequal exchange from the existing literature on trade inequalities, value transfers, and drain of wealth.  

This is not the alternative economics needs

Our first insight is trivial: Nievas and Piketty鈥檚 political economics is not radical. They describe fundamental and persistent inequalities at the heart of global capitalism but provide no fundamental criticism of global capitalism as an exploitative system endogenously generating various forms of inequality. Instead, they run counterfactual simulations that cancel out colonial extraction (for example, tributary payments), price differentials between raw materials and manufactured goods, and balance them with hypothetical decreases in the consumption of high income segments. These simulations suggest that persistent global inequalities result from a (vast and heterogenous) collection of one-off market distortions. 

Consequently, they propose fundamental, but not systemic, regulatory changes that should enable market-driven global convergence. The authors argue that 鈥渃hanges in bargaining power and terms of exchange can have enormous consequences on the relative wealth of nations and on their development opportunities,鈥� and discuss the possibilities of designing a mutually beneficial trade and monetary system through structural reforms of the international monetary and exchange system, a language that is familiar from economic textbooks and IMF publications. It amounts to the defence of hopelessly failing mainstream theories of international macroeconomics by means of identifying isolated imperfections.

No theory of political and economic power relations

That is a toothless conceptualization of power and conflict in global capitalism, where international inequalities are expressed in and through the market mechanism and competition, not as deviations from it. Political and economic power are inseparable, especially at the international level, a pattern the authors themselves describe with the help of the relationship of colonial extraction and capital accumulation.  As capital accumulation transgressed national borders and gained an international character, it built on and transformed existing inequalities, and created new ones as an inherently uneven process. By implication, the roots and interplay of political and economic power need theorization. While the authors state that 鈥済lobal economic relations appear to be characterized by persistent inequalities and power relations rather than self-correcting market mechanisms鈥� (p.7), their conclusions delude that the market mechanism would produce internationally equitable outcomes, if only non-economic power imbalances were held in check.

The study of what the authors call 鈥渦nequal exchange鈥� thereby becomes a descriptive, empiricist exercise. It does not provide (any) systematic analysis of the dynamics which favor the imperialist center, let alone understand them as an integral part of global capitalism. It comes as no surprise that they fully ignore the theoretical and empirical investigations undertaken in the past hundred years, associated with Marxist studies of imperialism, unequal exchange, and the vast dependency literature, which their paper has significant overlaps with.

A 鈥渂astardized鈥� theory of unequal exchange and imperialism

It is even more striking what Nievas and Piketty choose to ignore. They document how trade deficits in raw materials with simultaneous trade surplus in manufactured goods enabled the European imperialist powers of the 19th century to dominate global capital accumulation while sustaining a trade deficit. The crude distinction between raw materials and manufactured goods is a reasonable trade-off when harmonizing large datasets with considerable gaps, and when discussing the data collection. But the ensuing theoretical interpretation lags significantly behind the theoretical contributions of Marxist and dependency theories which argue that value transfers go from less to more capitalized, from high to low rates of surplus value production. 

Since the authors emphasize terms of trade and bargaining power rather than transfers of value based on conditions of production, and propose a justice-based reform agenda for international institutions, references at least to Ra煤l Prebisch and Hans Singer, or Arthur Lewis would have been expected. This structuralist tradition perceives the root of inequality in the deviation of actual terms of trade from an ideal set of relative prices reflecting perfect competition (that is, the absence of any imperfections or external factors distorting the market). Strictly speaking, this entails a relative loss of potential gains from trade rather than a drain of economic surplus in the sense of unequal exchange.  

The latter term, unequal exchange, is historically grounded within a Marxist theoretical framework. Unequal exchange exists even in a domestic context as a result of between-industry competition, which had already been analyzed by Marx. On the international level, in addition to differences between capital compositions across industries and countries, persistent differences in wages and rates of surplus value come up as a second channel of value transfers. Arghiri Emanuel formulated this dual mechanism of value transfers, and pioneered unequal exchange studies more than fifty years ago. The term unequal exchange refers to unequal magnitudes of social labor being traded at the same price, which favors the imperialist center to the disadvantage of less capital intensive and lower wage conditions of production in the periphery. 

Nievas and Piketty add insult to injury by putting the term unequal exchange in the paper title 鈥� without even mentioning the work of Arghiri Emmanuel, Samir Amin, Ruy Mauro Marini, and many other thinkers. We encounter the same problem when the authors interpret the imbalance of net foreign asset holdings. Hilferding鈥檚 and Lenin鈥檚 analysis of capital exports as a strategy of accumulation beyond borders, as well as to enforce the dependency of the periphery, ground these phenomena in analysis. But the authors only cite them as examples for early empirical approaches to the topic and forgo any theoretical explanation of the root causes as well as the consequences of capital exports. 

Unlike some critics on social media, though, we do not regard this as some form of plagiarism, as their paper does not rely on the insights of the terms of trade, unequal exchange, or imperialism literature. At most, much like when Joan Robinson coined the term 鈥渂astard Keynesians鈥� for those who cited Keynes only to reinforce earlier equilibrium models which Keynes鈥� theory overcame, we could speak of a bastardization of unequal exchange: they use the term in a purely descriptive way, deliberately ignoring its intellectual history, which allows them to avoid the discussion of capitalism as an exploitative mode of production with built-in tendencies to generate massive inequalities in income, wealth, and power within and across countries.

An alternative approach anchored in value theory

Marxist theory (and the classical political economics tradition in general) argues that commodity prices gravitate around centers that are regulated by the direct labor time necessary to reproduce a commodity as well as indirect labor used up in the form of capital inputs, and an economy-wide general profit rate. A substantial empirical literature corroborates this theory as a general empirical pattern. And the theory of unequal exchange is precisely concerned with unequal amounts of social labor being traded at the same monetary price: transfers of value. Once the underlying theory of value is discarded in favor of a subjectivist approach, as Nievas and Piketty do, there is nothing unequal being exchanged, strictly speaking.

Their interpretation of the impressive data collection is neither systemic nor structural in a meaningful sense. This extends beyond the usual lamenting that non-radical economists tend to suggest some original or desirable variety of capitalism exists out there, in the vast depths of textbook knowledge, only to be discovered through market-centered reform. The paper lacks any clear theory of price beyond the assertion of bargaining power. It is true that power imbalances enable individual capitals as well as states to push others into unbalanced patterns of trade and accumulation. The crucial point is, however, that the capitalist mode of production and reproduction self-regulates in ways that generate these power imbalances. Therefore, the main aim of (classical and modern) political economics is to grasp those regulatory principles.   

There is an alternative, nevertheless, and the extensive dataset compiled by Nievas and Piketty will help enable such systematic analysis. The unequal exchange literature provides a consistent framework to understand how imperialism operates in trade through transfers of value, through capital exports and debt traps, and in value capture by non production industries like finance and trade. In our forthcoming book titled , we provide a framework to estimate international value transfers brought up by the market mechanism (rather than distortions thereof) based on the tendential equalization of profit rates and non-equalization of wages (and rates of surplus value). This allows us to estimate the relative importance of differences in (1) value compositions of capital, and (2) rates of surplus in overall transfers of value through international trade. The same framework can also accommodate the analysis of value capture by non-production industries and capital exports, which makes use of exactly the kind of data Nievas and Piketty gather. Rather than relying on bargaining power as the dominant form of price formation, we show that labor values regulate the centers of gravity for market prices, and how competition expresses and deepens international inequalities. 

Difficulties mostly arising from the availability of data aside, the approach briefly outlined above has the crucial merit of integrating the spheres of production and circulation. It allows for studying various phenomena ranging from productivity differentials to trade accounts, from regularities between prices and values to terms of trade, from unequal exchange to power asymmetries on grounds of a materialistic understanding of society and history. A corollary, which might be charmless, or even repulsive to some, is the following: if all these are integral parts of the same totality called global capitalism, challenging one or more of them implies challenging the latter. This is the crux of the actual unequal exchange literature which Nievas and Piketty spirit away.

G眉ney I艧谋kara is a a Clinical Associate Professor in Liberal Studies at New York University.

received his PhD in Economics from the New School for Social Research in 2022. Patrick鈥檚 research gravitates around the political economy of labor, inequality and capitalism.

“Europe鈥檚 new external investment strategy needs to reconnect with historical business models we are going back to white elephants of 1970s 鈥� because that鈥檚 what partners want“

– G7 official in a speech on Trade and Finance.

“The era of Western dominance has indeed definitely ended“

– Josep Borrell (2024).^听

On 28 January 2024, three members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, announced their withdrawal from ECOWAS.  Created in 1974, ECOWAS is a regional economic community serving as a large trading bloc, to enhance the regional integration and economic cooperation of its 15 member countries.  The three countries鈥� decision to leave the trade-bloc so forthrightly, was related to a series of ECOWAS-imposed sanctions on their military governments and the countries鈥� objection to French influence in the bloc. Long-standing dissatisfaction with the ECOWAS was also an overarching factor; member countries include some of the most resource-rich nations, but on the whole members barely made any progress on socio-economic indicators linked to the ECOWAS promise of prosperity through regional integration.

Political uncertainty in the trade-bloc further deteriorated in mid-February 2024, when the Senegalese President Macky Sall, unilaterally postponed the country鈥檚 presidential elections and was later ousted. Faced with such existential challenges, ECOWAS lifted sanctions on Niger and other countries within a month of their imposition. While the potential breakdown of ECOWAS and the general trajectory of some African countries into authoritarianism, may not seem like a radical shift in the continent鈥檚 history, the incendiary global context, which compelled ECOWAS to lift sanctions is unprecedented. The neo-colonial drivers of the current crumbling political order in Sudan and the Congo as well as the ongoing genocide in Palestine, indelibly expose the reality that we are entering into an era of naked colonial violence. Backlash to US-centred imperialism is growing. In March 2024, Niger suspended all military relations with the US, citing issues related to US encroachment upon its sovereignty. Embedded in this evolving situation, the episodic and ad-hoc de-linking of Global South countries from Global North countries and their dominance in blocs such as the ECOWAS is representative of a broader shift in Africa鈥檚 resistance against political and economic subordination to G7 countries.

Against this background, the Western powers鈥� new and evolving development strategy in Africa offers important insights into how the G7 countries are failing to register the transformative changes in Africa.  In a closed-door speech on investment, trade and finance forum, a G7 official described Europe鈥檚 new external investment strategy as one that harkens back to the White elephants of the 1970s. While the speaker was using the term 鈥榃hite Elephant鈥� to signify the EU鈥檚 interest in funding hard infrastructure, imbued with a promise of investment and growth for recipient countries, he clearly failed to grasp its meaning. A 鈥榳hite elephant鈥� is an overly expensive infrastructure asset, which fails to generate value for the economy.

Considered in light of the correct definition of the term, the West鈥檚 new development strategy does seem to be going towards expensive infrastructure projects, spurred by a reactionary, performative but ultimately imagined competition with China. I make this point through a comparative analysis between the G7s contemporary development strategy vis-脿-vis the Chinese development model as it unfolds within the broader demise of US-led imperialism.

Delineating Origins: Historical Imperialism vs. Bipolar World Order

Most comparative literature on Western and Chinese development strategies in Africa, fails to ground the colonial and neo-colonial reality of African development. This central omission engenders a hollow comparison, which ultimately forgoes the question of temporality and the historical nature of a unipolar imperial world order. Centring the agency of African countries entails a historical mapping, which not only connects the past to the present but is also cognizant of when and how path dependencies are ruptured. Three facts are key to any comparative analysis of Western-Chinese competition in Africa.

Firstly, China鈥檚 current global developmental model, which can be continuously traced to the early 2000s cannot compare to the 100-year history of European imperialism in Africa.  This temporality is central to the analyses, not a mere addendum. This is because Europe never left Africa. Chinese engagement with African countries took place in conjunction with European and Western economic and political interference in the region. China鈥檚 rich history of supporting anti-imperialist struggles in Africa as well as leading South-South cooperation initiatives under Mao Zedong have been extensively documented and present a very different vision of development rooted in third world solidarity.  However, this historical analysis is completely ignored in most mainstream analysis and China鈥檚 engagement with Africa and the Global South since the 2000s is placed on par with the Western imperialist model.

As others have argued more concretely, the notion of imperialism is embedded in a historical structure of global capitalism, which cannot be abstracted and selectively applied to the new bi-polar world (Capasso & Kadri, 2023; Ajl 2024, Yeros 2024). While Chinese investment projects must be subject to scrutiny and critique, the notion, context and nature of imperialism, old and new, must be based on the systemisation of global capitalist extraction. A starting point here is to note that China鈥檚 鈥榞oing out鈥� or external investment strategy emerged in the aftermath of its remarkable achievement of alleviating domestic poverty. The Chinese development experience was thus not predicated on a model of imperial extraction, which has been the modus-operandi of most Western developed nations.

Secondly and aligned with the first point, the nature and scale of Chinese investments in Africa within this short period has been transformational in its focus on infrastructure and emphasis on the systemisation of productive capacities in African countries. The Chinese state-led 鈥榞oing out鈥� strategy, approached development from a holistic perspective, centring productive investment and infrastructure as the key to enabling inter-sectoral and cross-sectoral linkages. This was possible owing to China鈥檚 capacity to maintain control over the entire value chain of development: from providing financing through its state banks to the mapping, completion and execution of projects.

This model of development-investment has not been the nature of Western investments, which have largely focused on 鈥渟oft development鈥� since the late 1990s (explained below). Most importantly, countries categorised as low-income and least developed were considered extremely risky for Western capital and therefore not a desirable investment destination. The huge influx of Chinese investment into these countries in fact addressed this obstacle for Western capital. China鈥檚 risk-taking capacity engendered and facilitated other investment strategies. Therefore, the rise of Western infrastructure connectivity projects- such as roads, bridges  must be located as derivative of China鈥檚 鈥榞oing out鈥� strategy.

Thirdly and building upon the two points above, while the very purpose of a comparative analysis is to juxtapose differences and similarities between approaches, mainstream analysis听a priori听assumes an overlap between Chinese and Western development strategies based on a superficial semblance. This assumption can be observed in the equivocation of two very different financing models in journalistic reporting as well as mainstream academic literature. A forced similitude between a neoliberal financing model (US/EU) and a state-led financing model (China) thus reverberates endless confusion as opposed to producing any real analysis. As Samir Amin (2018) reminds us:

“Deng Xiaoping said that you should start from looking at actual facts. It is exactly what the conventional professional 鈥渆conomists鈥� 鈥� all of them, including the Chinese 鈥渆xperts鈥� trained in the USA and brainwashed 鈥� do not do.”^听

To overcome this limitation, the analysis must start from comparing the nature of Chinese and Western development strategies.

Calibrating Development and Conditions

A basic definition of 鈥榠nternational development鈥� is the financial and technical transfer of resources from some countries to others, to the ends of empowering the latter. While the 1948 Marshall Plan for Europe was premised on the reconstruction and the reorientation of European markets to be better aligned with the hegemony of US capital, the evolution of Western development strategies in the Global South took on a markedly different form.  The 1980s was the beginning of this transformative period, whereby Western development strategies and aid models laid an exclusive emphasis on targeting social indicators in Global South countries. Public goods such as health and education were major recipients of soft grants, however, these grants were often conditioned on the implementation of a privatisation roadmap as well as harmonising tools of liberal democracy such as 鈥楪ood Governance鈥�, exclusive funding for initiatives such as transparency, as well as monitoring and reform of electoral processes.

In addition, this financing model remained unaccompanied by investment in public spending, fiscal consolidation to promote developmental policy making, industrialisation in productive sectors and the reform and deepening of the financial sector to achieve financial autonomy. This created an artificial wedge in the very meaning of development: aid-led dependency was designed to separate and prioritise 鈥榮oft infrastructure鈥� at the expense of 鈥榟ard infrastructure.鈥� Donor dependency based on the soft development agenda accompanied by a marketization of public goods therefore accelerated the hollowing out of many Global South countries.  Privatisation successfully transformed the political model of governance in these countries: converting citizens into consumers.

In contrast, from the very beginning, China鈥檚 鈥榞oing out鈥� strategy in the 2000s was premised on the strengthening and expansion of productive investments and public services, making no artificial distinction between 鈥榟ard鈥� infrastructure and 鈥榮oft鈥� infrastructure. The primary focus was on the construction of infrastructure project tools including bridges, hospitals and roads albeit complemented by transfer and sharing of knowledge such as in medical training, civil service training for public bureaucrats and strengthening of public institutions. China鈥檚 emphasis on skill development, technology transfer and knowledge sharing is often ignored by most accounts comparing Chinese and Western development strategies. The fact that such knowledge sharing comes outside of the framework of Intellectual Property governance became much more visible after China鈥檚 distribution of Covid-19 vaccines to Global South countries during the Covid-19 pandemic. The distribution of vaccines as a public good was also accompanied by humanitarian assistance to some countries, highlighting the necessity of an alternative approach to development especially as western pharmaceutical companies enjoyed quadrupling profits through the sale of their vaccines.

An important and often repeated point of comparison between the Western and Chinese model is the specific nature and role of conditionalities. While the construct of 鈥榗onditionality鈥� as a necessary requisite for development assistance including grants, concessional flows and technical assistance is explicitly associated with Bretton Woods Institutions and Western bilateral development strategies emerging in the late 1990s, it has deeper roots in colonialism.

Western development strategy has been conditioned towards ensuring that the West remains distant from its historical past: in Africa鈥檚 case this essentially means the evasion of the Western countries鈥� reparative responsibility to African countries. Germany鈥檚 agreement to pay reparations to Namibia in 2021 was a historic shift but the modality and actual implementation of these reparations remains contested as some consider it 鈥榯okenistic鈥� in nature. Beyond this case, Western development policies, exemplified by the EU have been explicitly conditioned upon Africa鈥檚 compliance in enabling the free trade of resources, goods and commodities to the EU whilst simultaneously curbing African migration through the externalisation of European border militarization.

In comparison, albeit without colonial baggage, China鈥檚 contemporary development model is also concerned with access to commodities, raw materials and market creation for the absorption of Chinese surplus. However, unlike Western development strategies, this model is not linked to demands for better governance, interest in regime change for better compliance with Chinese investments, the implementation of sanctions and the imposition of penalties when conditions are not met. While select conditions are attached to China鈥檚 project procurement and contracts for goods and services as well as in cases of debt restructuring, the pattern which emerges in the impact of these conditions is markedly different from conditions embedded in the West dominated global financial architecture. China鈥檚 approach to conditions is largely concerned with ensuring the longevity and guarantee of economic investments and has produced both positive as well as adverse results for Global South countries.

However, these conditions are not egregious enough to immobilise countries, such as those observed in the historical and on-going impact of IMF and World Bank conditionalities.  The incompatibility of conditionalities in both Western and Chinese development strategies does not absolve a criticism of China, however it is equally important to ascertain the nature and context of Chinese conditions in Global South countries. The global impact of Western sanctions, rise of Western protectionism and competition between the West and China, in every possible realm has certain repercussions for China including in the realm of multilateralism and debt reform.  These need to be carefully researched.

In summary, a comparative analysis between  western development strategies and the Chinese development model necessitates rigour in differentiating between the historical and structural origins of their approaches. Western conditionalities have ultimately resulted in the gradual erosion of  sovereignty in Global South countries, repressing any avenues of third world solidarity and South-South cooperation.  China鈥檚 development strategies do not replicate this model.

The new Scramble for Africa: By Whom and How?

The comparative grounds for Western and Chinese development in Africa have gradually taken a new turn through a competing series of infrastructure connectivity models.  These models have some variation in their discrete proposals however the aim is to mobilise private finance and invest replacing traditional aid and concessional finance. More importantly, the strategies are traditional alliances between 鈥榣ike-minded partners鈥�, including the US, South Korea and Japan. US commercial investors and multilateral development institutions under the auspices of the US-led Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII) ensure the continuation of the failing US-led neoliberal order.

While different models now focus on enhanced coordination between Export Credit Agencies (ECAs) to effectively create an environment for domestic  investments to be subsidised through export credits and development financing it is important to note that China鈥檚 development model has always combined financing and trade with China鈥檚 Eximbank being at the centre of its global investments. The Western turn towards hard 鈥榠nfrastructure鈥�, use of export credits for development suggests a superficial emulation of characteristics which mark the Chinese development. This is because beyond cosmetic shapeshifting, the Western corporate sector remains the determinant factor shaping the new development strategies, while the Chinese development model remains state-led under the direction of the Chinese communist party. While China continues to face a combination of different internal and international pressures, the Chinese State supersedes China鈥檚 domestic iteration of the private sector. In contrast, vessels like the EU are not simply promoting the interests of the EU private sector but strengthening the private sector of G7 countries to the ends of ensuring the continuation of the US-led neoliberal order.

This is most starkly visible in the EU鈥檚 recent attempt to balance its multiple goals of controlling migration through claims to 鈥渟ecuring鈥� its borders, supporting the genocide in Gaza and broader colonization of Palestine and partnering with US-aligned Gulf capital to extend neoliberal policies throughout the region. In March 2024, the EU provided a 鈧�7.4 billion ($8.06 billion) funding package to Egypt for the period 2024-2027. The EU support complemented the IMF鈥檚 expanded $8 billion loan deal with Egypt in the same month and was also complemented by a $35bn investment deal between Egypt and the UAE for developing the Ras al-Hekma peninsula. Egypt is therefore a site for the West鈥檚 new unfolding development agenda, which seeks to securitise EU borders against African and Palestinian migrants as the EU and the West continue to support Israel militarily.

As the Western order declines, the EU and developed countries are under pressure to invest and deliver on greater distributional gains, especially when it comes to serving Global South elite interests. From this perspective, China鈥檚 developmental model is also not entirely immune to the contradictions of capitalist development. These contradictions must be analysed from the duality of China鈥檚 national or domestic experience as well as its external development model. China continues to experiment with select liberalisation and privatisation with an overarching retention of state ownership.

China鈥檚 experimentation with Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) on a domestic level and the initiation of PPPs in recipient countries is one such example. Other examples include the nature of Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank (AIIB) investments in Global South countries, China鈥檚 adoption of private finance instruments created by Bretton Woods Institutions and China鈥檚 role in reforming the sovereign debt architecture. The pressures of operating in a neo-liberal world order, playing on the 鈥榦penness鈥� of countries, which have free trade agreements with Western markets and integration into the development finance architecture creates a host of issues for China and recipient countries. These issues require scrutiny, critique and reform especially concerning their impact on Global South countries.

A critical approach to Chinese investment also means a concrete understanding of China鈥檚 global rise, which initiated as an interplay with the existing hegemonic order but has been subject to China鈥檚 vigilance in disciplining its companies and curbing rentierism, both at the national level as well as in its international projects.  In 2021, China launched the Global Development Initiative (GDI), which is designed to complement the BRI but embeds a vision of development based on China鈥檚 own development experience with an enhanced focus on knowledge sharing, technology transfer and South-South development. The initiative is free of patents and dominance of intellectual property rights and rent seeking. Although it is too early to predict the developmental impact of the GDI, China鈥檚 focus on a more communal approach to development, such as in the case of Covid-19 vaccine distribution needs to be contextualised and reflected in the GDI model. China continues to adapt, evolve and regulate its economic rise. Nonetheless, it is ideologically, structurally and materially a different development model, which necessitates engagement on its own terms, even when these terms appear superficially comparable to the development models of traditional imperial powers like the US and the EU.

Conclusion

As Western blocs such as the EU transform into a full-fledged war economy strengthening NATO, proposing the use of its public banks like the European Investment Bank (EIB) to lend to the defence industry as well as exploring the option of a new EU army, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Western constructs of 鈥榙evelopment鈥�, 鈥榠nvestment鈥� and 鈥榮ecurity鈥� can no longer remain in their siloed guises.

This is not merely a turn towards Keynesian warfare 鈥� it is a continuation of Western history and a symbol of the West鈥檚 political woes, as its countries succumb to domestic fascism. Meanwhile China continues its strategy of deepening the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) at a pace of its own, subject to the contradictions of capitalist development including dealing with issues of problematic projects in recipient countries. The paradigm of development as a comparative ground for Western and Chinese is not external to these formations but embedded within these changes. As detailed above, the grounds for a comparative analysis between the West and China must extend from their historical engagement with Africa to the current situation of escalating violence and the decline of US-led Western order.

African agency between such powers lies in securing the interests of its people through a combination of strategies including stronger criteria for partnerships, de-linking with US-led imperial conduits and an enhanced focus on perpetually increasing its bargaining power through strengthening its domestic productive capacities.

Farwa Sial is a Research Associate at the Department of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

Featured Photograph: China mall on the spintex Road, Accra, Ghana ().

This article was first published on the ROAPE blog.

Notes

Borrell Josep (2024) Munich Security Conference: the four tasks on the EU鈥檚 geopolitical agenda . .

 The sanctions first implemented on Niger and then applied selectively to Mali and Burkina Faso included trade bans, freezing of financial transactions, closure of borders between the ECOWAS and the three countries as well as travel bans on select individuals.

Al Jazeera (2024) Niger suspends military cooperation with US: Spokesman. 

 The Group of Seven (G7) is an informal forum that brings together the advanced industrialised economies of Italy, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The European Union also participates in the group. The G7 is home to 776 million people and the aggregate domestic product (GDP) of G7 member states represents about 30 percent of the global economy.

 Yu, G. T. (1977). China and the Third World. Asian Survey, 17(11), 1036鈥�1048. ;  Mao Zedong (1959) Africa鈥檚 task is to struggle against imperialism. Available at the Wilson Centre Archive ; Taylor, I. (2018) 鈥楳ao Zedong鈥檚 China and Africa鈥�, Twentieth Century Communism, 15, 47+, available: 

 Capasso, M., & Kadri, A. (2023). The imperialist question: A sociological approach. Middle East Critique, 32(2), 149鈥�166 ; Ajl, M. (2024). Palestine鈥檚 Great Flood: Part I. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 13(1), 62-88. ; Yeros, P. (2024). A World Will Only Be Possible by the Intervention of the 鈥淪ixth Great Power鈥�. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 13(1), 14-40. 

 Samir Amin (May 2018) 鈥� Financial Globalization: Should China move in? Defend Democracy press. 

 New Arab News (2024) Egypt economic crisis: What is Ras al-Hekma and why is Cairo 鈥榮elling it鈥� to UAE? 

 Lydia Jones & Michael J. Bloomfield (2020) PPPs in China: Does the Growth in Chinese PPPs Signal a Liberalising Economy? New Political Economy, 25:5, 829-847, DOI:10.1080/13563467.2020.1721451

 China South Global Project (2024) China Could Fund Kenyan Rail Through Public-Private Partnership: Kenyan President  

 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China (2022) Jointly Advancing鈥倀he Global Development Initiative and Writing鈥俛 New Chapter for Common Development.  

 Somdeep Sen, NATO and the global colour line, International Affairs, Volume 100, Issue 2, March 2024, Pages 491鈥�507, 

Euractiv (2024) EIB ready to 鈥榮tretch鈥� lending criteria as it prepares for EU Council鈥檚 call to arms 

Defensenews (2024) EU member countries push back on Italy鈥檚 call for European army 

Drawing realised by artist Pawel Kuczy艅ski for Serena Natile’s book

I came to the study of fintech as a feminist socio-legal scholar researching the gender dynamics of South-South migration. While doing fieldwork in Kenya for my PhD in 2012, I came across M-Pesa, a mobile money service used by locals as an instrument for transferring money from urban to rural areas. From the start of my research in 2011 to the completion of my PhD in 2016, ongoing studies on M-Pesa were mainly celebratory. It was acclaimed as an innovative instrument for poverty reduction, development, and gender equality and was enthusiastically supported by donors and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as by tech entrepreneurs and corporate philanthropy. Its success story was so uncontested that I decided to change my research question to focus on the gender dynamics of digital financial inclusion, rather than on my initial interest, migration.

The key narrative of M-Pesa鈥檚 success in terms of gender equality was, and still is, that it facilitates women鈥檚 access to financial services, providing them with a variety of opportunities to improve their own livelihoods and those of their families, their communities, and ultimately their countries. In the specific case of M-Pesa, a basic-mobile-phone-enabled money transfer service is considered more accessible and available than transferring money via mainstream financial institutions such as banks, and more reliable and secure than informal finance channels such as moneylenders or the handling of cash via rotating credit and savings associations (ROSCAs). This claim is based on three assumptions: first, that women have less access to financial services than men have; second, that women would use their access to finance to support not only themselves but also their families and communities; and third, that digital financial services are better than informal financial channels because they overcome the limits of cash, ensuring traceability and security. These assumptions motivated advocacy and investment in digital financial inclusion projects and the creation of ad hoc programmes and institutions, all strongly focused on the question of how digital technology can be used to facilitate women鈥檚 access to financial services.

During the time of my fieldwork in Kenya, empirical research on M-Pesa was very common. (FSD) Kenya, an institution funded by Western donors and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to contribute to Kenya鈥檚 financial development and address constraints to financial inclusion, was actively collaborating with local and international researchers and producing numerous studies on the uses and potential of mobile money for women. As I discuss in my , M-Pesa, unlike some development projects, was characterised by not a lack but an overproduction of data. However, none of the studies contextualised the story of M-Pesa within the broader historical and contemporary gendered structures and power relations that define and regulate the global economy and the international development project.

The individual and groups (chamas) of women using M-Pesa that I interviewed were all accustomed to being asked questions about how they benefited from mobile money. A general answer that was always reported in M-Pesa success stories was that mobile money allowed them to manage money more efficiently and to juggle different tasks such as housework and micro-entrepreneurship. For this reason, the increasing number of women using M-Pesa as a more accessible financial service was presented as a success story in terms of gender equality. However, on asking the same women different questions about their everyday lives it became clear that the equation of access to M-Pesa with gender equality was a lot more complex than it appeared. To use any financial service such as M-Pesa requires money in the first place, and women鈥檚 main concern was about not managing money but having money to manage. They wanted a regular and stable source of income, for instance via secure employment, to be able to pay for food and water, school fees, housing, healthcare, electricity and all other basic services, particularly in the absence of public social infrastructure and state support. This is the main reason why informal financial institutions such as ROSCAs remained essential in women鈥檚 everyday lives, even as the use of M-Pesa spread. In ROSCAs women put together resources to support their livelihoods based on a system of trust, solidarity and reciprocal accountability. Women鈥檚 strong awareness of global and local structural injustices urges them to create grassroots mechanisms to satisfy their immediate needs while continuing to protest and strike for their rights.

Beatrice Karore is the founder of (Grassroots Women) Initiative, and a community mobiliser and human rights defender in Mathare, Nairobi, Kenya. 

While M-Pesa did not replace ROSCAs, it was integrated into grassroots practices; for instance mobile money is used to facilitate small payments and store money in the M-Pesa e-wallet, despite the fact that mobile money is not designed or regulated for use as a savings account. The integration of a digital financial service such as M-Pesa into informal practices can be seen as a doorway to expanding capitalist logics into spaces previously outside the purview of capitalist markets, making such spaces vulnerable to value-extraction via fees and data. The women in my focus groups were well aware of these dynamics but had no power to change them, and often have no choice but to accept them or attempt to play the market鈥檚 game. Various products and services built on the M-Pesa platform target fundamental needs such as access to water, healthcare, electricity and education, providing credit-based flexible arrangements that allow small, irregular repayments. These products and services are funded via complex institutional and financial arrangements that involve public and private institutions including governments, donors, international institutions, the private sector, and corporate philanthropy. The arrangements are grounded in market logics and claim to create incentives for the private sector while contributing to social development. However, such initiatives do not improve access to increasingly privatised and marketised resources and services, and they make access to key services conditional on financial inclusion, creating further gendered problems such as indebtedness and generational vulnerability.

The gendered disadvantage in financial inclusion is perpetrated by the uncontested assumption that access to financial services leads to gender equality. This results in policies and institutions focusing on how to include the excluded rather than addressing the more important and complex question of why financial inclusion is gendered as well as racialised and based on class, socioeconomic and migration status, coloniality, and geopolitical location. In my research I consider this an essential question if we are to understand whether and to what extent new digital financial inclusion services such as M-Pesa can contribute to gender equality. Interrogating how unequal gender relations are embedded in processes of financial exclusion and narratives of inclusion involves using gender as an analytical and methodological tool to understand where inequalities lie in the global economic and legal order. Examining coloniality in this context, as the long-standing patterns of power that emerge in the context of colonialism (Mendoza, 2016), is not just a conceptual choice but is driven by the need to understand the gendered dynamics of financial inclusion and exclusion and why and how women have become the target of financial inclusion policies.

Colonialism created a situation which subjected people of the Global South to Western domination via the occupation of their land, extraction of their natural resources, and exploitation of their labour. Indigenous people found their norms and institutions erased or filtered (e.g. via the non-repugnancy clause: the requirement that colonial law be in keeping with the law of the colonisers鈥� home country) in the interest of Western economic interests and ideologies, and this is evident if we use gender as an analytical framework. As the Kenyan scholar Achola Pala Okeyo (1977) explains, while men and women under colonialism shared a similar subordinate structural position in relation to the dominant culture, colonial rules had differential impacts on them, shaping gender relations. The colonisers鈥� commodification of land and introduction of property law undermined more collective forms of ownership in favour of patriarchal relations that saw men as the household heads and holders of land titles (Manji 2006, Maathai 2008). The monetarisation of economic relations and introduction of the wage economy targeted men as paid workers (albeit in discriminatory and exploitative colonial settings) and the family breadwinners, relegating women to the position of secondary unpaid workers (Boserup 1970). This contributed to the framing of women as responsible for unpaid household and community labour, dependent on men for money and hence excluded from financial services. This also explains why women in formerly colonised countries are so predominant in informal employment and informal finance, because while excluded from formal economic institutions they had to be able to survive in a capitalist monetarised system built on that exclusion.

The end of colonialism did not lead to the fair redistribution of resources and opportunities that the women fighting colonial power had hoped for. Nationally, many local elite rulers did not dismantle colonial gendered structures but used them for their own power and purposes. For instance according to Kenyan feminist scholars, the government used ideas related to 鈥楢fricanisation鈥� (a concept critiqued by Fanon (1961) as distinct from decolonisation) to discriminate against women (Nzomo 1993, Oduol and Kabira 1995, Otieno 1998, Maathai 2010). Despite women having played a key role in the struggle for independence from colonial rule, they were 鈥榙omesticated鈥� (Rogers 1980, Mies 1986), denied political power and access to wealth. For instance the second Kenyan President, Daniel arap Moi, encouraged women to join the Maendeleo ya Wanawake Organisation (MYWO, 鈥楶rogress for Women鈥� in Swahili) which was founded during the colonial era by a group of Western administrators and their wives who sought to improve the status of Kenyan women according to dominant Western values with the purpose of educating them to become good mothers and housewives (Oduol and Kabira 1995).

Women in formerly colonised countries found themselves at the lower end of the power distribution both nationally and internationally. The demands of anticolonial campaigns in the 1950s鈥�1970s from the Non-Aligned Movement, the (NIEO), and particularly of the invisible women鈥檚 grassroots movements (Basu, 1995) for a just international system based on reparation and redistribution were dismissed in favour of an order aimed at protecting Western economic interests and ideology. In this international order, and in the development narrative underpinning it, women in formerly colonised countries have been portrayed progressively as victims, as recipients of aid, and as icons of change invested with the responsibility for developing their communities and countries. Following Ester Boserup鈥檚 1970 report on women鈥檚 exclusion from economic development, first women鈥檚 inclusion () and later gender equality () became central in international development discourse. Despite this, the voices of women from formerly colonised countries remained excluded from official international fora, a space dominated by white Western men, and were often subordinated to Western women in alternative fora such as the (Oyewumi 1997, 2003). This meant that in practice they had no power to resist international policies such as the neoliberal structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) of the 1980s鈥�90s that pushed them to the lower end of the global income distribution.

, Hofburg Palace, Vienna, Austria, 1969

The negative impact of SAPs on women has been widely documented by feminist scholars (see for instance Elson 1989, 1991). Compulsory privatisation and reduced government spending on social services increased the burden of women鈥檚 unpaid labour. In the context of the SAPs the internationalisation of microcredit 鈥� small collateral-free loans to collectively-liable groups of women to start income-generating activities 鈥� became a common gender equality policy that replaced state funding and was perfectly compatible with neoliberal ideas of marketisation and entrepreneurship. However, in reality microcredit rarely allowed women to start a remunerative business that could change their socioeconomic status, as the micro loans only allowed micro-entrepreneurship, with which local markets were already saturated and for which there was limited demand. Very often microcredit loans were used to pay for essential resources and services that became inaccessible for many women at the lower end of the income distribution following the adoption of neoliberal policies. In other words, microcredit was offered as a market-based solution for exclusions caused first by colonialism and later by development, while taking advantage of established colonial infrastructure and power relations.

Private-sector-enabled digital financial services such as M-Pesa are no different. Fintech is presented as a solution to exclusions created by colonialism and development interventions, but is itself a product of coloniality. Fintech adds an additional layer of inequality to financial exclusion: technology. is embedded in unequal relations of power and wealth, with Western states and corporations having the resources to define the trajectory and purpose of technological development. In addition to issues created by microcredit such as over-indebtedness and gendered stigma and abuse (Goetz 1996, Rahman 1999, Kabeer 2001, Mayoux 2002), digital finance creates new possibilities for exploitation and extraction, (e.g. via fees and data), expanding the number of actors from digital providers to various private-sector actors who profit from creating new little-regulated mobile money products and services. For these reasons the argument I develop in is that fintech does not contribute to gender equality because it does not address any of the causes of gendered financial exclusion but rather enhances unequal power relations. Promoting the narrative that digital financial inclusion contributes to gender equality, creates problems that need highlighting.

First, this narrative does not recognise digital financial services as a product of global asymmetries of wealth and power that are embedded in and reproduce gendered inequalities. These asymmetries are evident at different levels of the system: M-Pesa was institutionalised via a public-private partnership between the aid branch of a former colonial government (the UK Department for International Development, now assimilated into the Foreign Office) and the UK-based multinational corporation Vodafone, which was enabled to expand and acquire African telecoms by the SAP鈥檚 requirement for privatisation of national industries; the intellectual property of M-Pesa was registered in the names of Vodafone and the UK-based tech company Sagentia, rather than that of the local provider Safaricom; the development of the M-Pesa platform has been left unregulated for years in order not to hinder technological innovation, resulting in the proliferation of extractive products and services built on its platform; and the M-Pesa platform is privately owned, with profits made by Safaricom, Vodafone and international shareholders. Specific gender-equality projects are funded via corporate philanthropy rather than investing the profits created by M-Pesa in public social infrastructure and support to address gendered disadvantage.

Second, the claim that digital finance contributes to gender equality removes attention from the actual causes of gendered financial exclusion and the need for serious local and international redistributive interventions. These would include regulating international trade, investments and finance in the interest of people rather than profit; establishing an international and national taxation system that funds universal social security; ensuring workers鈥� rights and living wages and salaries; and cancelling the external debt imposed on countries of the Global South with SAPs, allowing them public resources for welfare rather than forcing them to rely on conditional aid, philanthropy and exploitative investments. Such measures should prevent Western countries and corporations taking advantage of the global economy (e.g. through the use of cheap labour, materials and markets) with no contribution to the wellbeing of the global population.

Third, the logic of opportunity created by fintech results in an unequal distribution of benefits and risks between digital financial providers and users, with important implications for gender equality. The digital financial inclusion-gender equality nexus is based on the idea that women need to take advantage of the opportunities created by digital finance to improve their and others鈥� livelihoods; however, as feminist political economy and the concept of social reproduction teach us, this generates a further layer of responsibility for women: the responsibility for transforming opportunity into success without any support in the form of income, social security or social infrastructure; while for the providers, including all the actors involved in the fintech business, digital finance represents a secure source of profit via fees and data.

This analysis has shown that 鈥榙ecolonising fintech鈥� should be a contextual purposive action rather than a cosmetic claim. It requires historicising the analysis of the fintech infrastructure and its institutional arrangements with a clear commitment to building grassroots power to create anti-colonial futures, aiming to end socioeconomic injustice via a radical redistribution of wealth and power.

is a feminist scholar based at Warwick Law School, University of Warwick. Her research engages with socio-legal inquiry, international political economy analysis, and feminist methodologies to examine issues of coloniality, social reproduction, and maldistribution and, more broadly, the relationship between law and social (in)justice.

This post is part of the mini-blog series Decolonising for Whom? Recentring grassroots struggles and voices in the 鈥榙ecolonising fintech鈥� narrative and the ongoing blog series Decolonizing Economics.

References:

Basu A. (1995) The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women鈥檚 Movements in Global Perspective. Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press.

Boserup E. (1970) Women鈥檚 Role in Economic Development. London: Allen and Unwin.

Elson D. (1989) The Impact of Structural Adjustments on Women: Concepts and Issues in B Onimode (ed) The IMF, The World Bank and the African Debt, Volume 2: The Social and Political Impact. London: Zed Press.

Elson D. (1991) 鈥楽tructural Adjustment: Its Effect on Women鈥� in T Wallace and C March (eds) Changing Perceptions: Writings on Gender and Development. Oxford: Oxfam.

Fanon F. (1961) The Wreched of the Earth, London: Penguin Books.

Goetz A. M. (1996) Who Takes Credit? Gender, Power and Control over Loan Use in Rural Credit Programs in Bangladesh. World Development 24(1), 45-63.

Kabeer N (2001) Conflicts over Credit: Re-evaluating the Empowerment Potential of Loans to Women in Rural Bangladesh. World Development 29(1), 63-84.

Maathai, W. (2008) Unbowed: One Woman鈥檚 Story. London: Arrow Books.

Maathai W. (2010) The Challenge of Africa. London: Arrow Books.

Manji, A. (2006) The Politics of Land Reform in Africa. London: Zed Books.

Mayoux L. (2002) Women鈥檚 Empowerment or Feminisation of Debt? Towards a New Agenda in African Microfinance. London: One World Action.

Mendoza (2016), 鈥楥oloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality, in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, Oxford: OUP.

Mies M. (1986) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books.

Nzomo, J. (1993) The Kenya鈥檚 Women Movement in a Changing Political Context, in S. Khasiani and E. Njiro (eds) The Women鈥檚 Movement in Kenya. Nairobi: Association of African Women for Research and Development.

Oduol W. and Kabira W. (1995) 鈥楾he Mother of Warriors and Her Daughters: The Women鈥檚 Movement in Kenya鈥�, in A Basu (ed), The Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women鈥檚 Movements in Global Perspective. Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press.

Okeyo, Achola Pala (1977) 鈥楧efinitions of Women and Development: An African Perspective鈥� Signs. Journal of women in culture and society 3(1).

Otieno W. W. (1998) Mau Mau鈥檚 Daughter: A Life History. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Oyewumi O. (1997) The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Oyewumi O. (ed) (2003), African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood. Trenton: Africa World Press.

Rahman, A. (1999) Women and Microcredit in Rural Bangladesh. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Rogers B. (1980) The Domestication of Women: Discrimination in Developing Societies, London: Kogan Page.

When we discuss the climate crisis in economics, we are often confronted with a debate resting on technical solutions, emissions paths, and energy use: a certain amount of time to go from coal to turbines means a certain amount of carbon dioxide emitted, which means a certain likely degree of global temperature change. In environmental economics, climate change and its associated environmental problems are often framed as 鈥榚xternalities鈥�; that is, unfortunate and unintended spillovers caused by market mechanisms. Often, social issues are taken into account within this narrative through sunny phrases like 鈥渟ustainable development鈥� or 鈥渏ust transition.鈥� The responsible parties are often individuals, states, or firms that are often thought to take action within the market. What does this debate look like if we take two different questions as starting points: not how to solve the climate crisis through market mechanisms and regulation, but how to solve the climate crisis while attending to the colonial legacy and exiting from contemporary neo-colonial accumulation patterns? Let us take a look.

The Common Discourse

A common narrative is that an industrialized humanity, churning out machinery and churning through hydrocarbons, is the primarily culprit for climate change. Firms as economic actors are often understood to have contributed to the crisis as well, since they respond to market signals, indexed in prices, and as a result, burn and pollute willy-nilly: what we call externalities. In this sense, the dominant discourse says that humanity on the whole has to shift from a carbon-fueled industrial civilization to a post-carbon civilization, relatively soon. The philosopher鈥檚 stone of decoupling is the means to do so: technological advance enabling a swapping out of extractive and CO2 emitting technology for non-CO2 emitting technology, allowing for growth without emissions. Economically, this also involves opening up new frontiers of accumulation, including turning nature into a final asset through assigning prices to ecosystems services, and creating new arenas of investment based on northern capital and southern states working in alliance to achieve a clean energy transition in the periphery of the world-system. Socially, this also assumes that capitalism is indifferent to racial disparities and Indigenous people; as it is assumed that through consultation with the latter or some kind of anti-racist legislation, alongside some tamping down of excess monopoly, we can achieve the utopia of not only clean, but also inclusive growth.

An Uncommon Discourse: Differentiated Responsibilities

A different notion of responsibility departs from a historical conception of the process of industrialization. It reminds us that we cannot understand industrialization outside the history of colonialism, and its relationship to a system of accumulation of surplus value 鈥� capitalism. Following the insights of , , , , , and , amongst others, this perspective characterizes the seemingly apolitical process of industrialization as linked the violence of primitive accumulation, commodification, exchange, and war. That is, the slave trade, the colonization of the United States, the erection of colonial plantations in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and Latin America, all contributing the raw materials, food items, and export markets which subtended the low-waged process of European and eventually US industrialization. These processes, whose echoes are still reverberating, produced a massive amount of CO2 emissions. Furthermore, contemporary patterns of exchange, although not occurring under direct colonial patterns of control, on South-North lines. That is, trade between formally independent states, based on the seemingly efficient price system, hides a new mode of control. An hour of labor in the North continues to reward than an hour of labor in the , even when using similar or identical technologies, and northern products exchange for ever-increasing amounts of southern resources over time. As a result, in the North, in part because wages and profit concentrate there, and produce and reproduce social-economic polarization within the world system.

Starting in the 1970s, scholars in the South like Amin, , and Gamani Corea began to argue that Southern and Northern responsibilities when it came to the ecological crisis were different. The South鈥檚 environmental problems were basically problems resolvable through becoming more developed, but developed in a way attentive to ecological harms. The North鈥檚 contribution to resolving the ecological crisis and dealing with their overall overuse of world resources and excessive waste production would be to help the South to industrialize in a just way, to stop using discourses of overpopulation, to share intellectual property and other resources, and to shift their style of development away from patterns which were using world resources on a scale which could not be replicated world-wide. This idea prefigured the notion of common yet differentiated responsibilities, as articulated at Rio in 1992: that the South and the North each certainly had responsibilities to deal with necessarily global ecological crises. But those responsibilities were differentiated because of their different histories: the legacy and lingering colonial and neo-colonial inheritance.

Ecologically Unequal Exchange

In the 2000s, notions of common yet differentiated responsibilities were increasingly codified intellectual through the idea of ecologically unequal exchange: that the global system of capitalist accumulation was not merely producing polarized wealth, but was polarizing the distribution of its wastes, and its use of natural resources. The North was using far more per person than the South, and the system of international trade, passing through the code of the price system, was dumping massive burdens of waste on the South, from garbage to from to waste from of minerals. Such pollution meant that people in the South suffered from diminished lives, , as a of being woven into capitalist accumulation.

Another face of this unequal exchange has been the North鈥檚 appropriation of world safe space for carbon dioxide emissions: that is, the North has emitted than its per-person fair share of the amount of carbon dioxide that could be emitted to keep the Earth below 350 parts per million of Carbon Dioxide. In fact, overall the North is overwhelmingly responsible for that overuse, with a tiny bit by now at least to China and somewhat more to Russia/the former Soviet Union. Although, given that their emissions have been guard themselves against foreign attack, it can be argued that such emissions are substantially also the responsibility of European-US-Japanese bloc.

Anti-Colonial Solutions: National Liberation and Climate Debt

If we accept the above analysis, a radical solution follows, and a radical resolution has been proposed: decolonize the atmosphere. This is what the proposed, through the payment of climate debt 鈥� a sub-portion of the ecological debt, which was in turn a sub-portion of the colonial debt 鈥� to the tune of 6 percent of northern GNP per year. That would be around $1.2 trillion from the US and $3.2 trillion from the OECD. This document also attacked capitalism and militarism and imperialism, and proposed a people-centered development focused on appropriate technology and food sovereignty.

A second element of such a radical solution is to understand that national liberation is the framework to achieve global ecological justice. National liberation, in the words of the agronomist and revolutionary , meant to 鈥渇ree the process of development of the national productive forces.鈥� That means countries have to be free of foreign military attack, free of foreign control over their economies through unequal exchange and patent control, free of debt burdens, free of monopoly foreign control over their land, and free to plan and trade freely. Under those circumstances, they will be in a position to advocate for climate debt repayments as a means to install appropriate energy infrastructure, transportation systems, and the tools needed for endogenous industrialization (most countries don鈥檛 need any help with their national agricultures other than to place them under popular and poor peoples and peasants鈥� control).

Accompanying these processes means integrating carbon accounting into economic planning North and South. This, in turn, demands for the North to cease grabbing and enclosing more atmospheric space, and to shift to a less-resource intensive and more socialized development model that orients not to a national ecological development blind to northern relationships with the South, the former colonized world, but rather to a type of plan that allows for a global commonwealth and world developmental resurgence.

Max Ajl is a fellow at the Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb, a Senior Fellow at the University of Ghent, and a researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment. He is an associate editor at Agrarian South and on the editorial board of Middle East Critique. His most recent book is A People’s Green New Deal. He tweets at .

This blog post is a part of the Decolonising Economics blog series.

Photo:  from Takoma Park, MD

Imperialism is still a relevant concept today, woven much more tightly into the structures of countries and economies than ever. The outcome of those seeking to expand their ownership or influence has stayed just as colonial and imperialist as ever before, especially now with the massive amount of capital accumulated in developed countries and the influence these countries have over the rest of the world. In a paper by John Foster, he quotes Harry Magdoff when he said, 鈥淚mperialism is the way of life of capitalism,鈥� when asked if it was still necessary (Foster et al., 2019). To expand, capitalism needs a mode or justification or framework that it adopts and has a history of working so well with, and that is imperialism. Colonizing, occupying, and dominating are blatant ways that imperialism effectively occurs in history. It has not changed significantly except that the people furthering their 鈥渆xpansion鈥� are not outrightly removing, killing, or taking resources from people; they now sign policies, laws, or rules, and then people follow this or follow it by force. Historically, the effects of imperialism have remained. We see this in the Native Americans who are forced to live on reservations whose way of life and traditions are limited due to state and private ownership of surrounding land in the form of preservations, parks, or plants for resourcing.

Imperialism can manifest in various forms: military, economic, cultural, agricultural, technological, and political influence. The United States, for example, has the largest military in the world, spending billions of dollars on funding its military and weaponry and maintaining this presence in countries worldwide. It has military bases all over the U.S. but also in Japan, Germany, and South Korea, amongst the most significant bases, and then in at least 80 countries such as Turkey, Bahrain, Spain, Honduras, and Cuba (O’Dell, 2023). This form of maintaining an imperialist presence is, in many ways, a reminder of the global hegemon that is the U.S. militarily and economically. The 鈥渟ilent鈥� presence of the military that Prabhat Patnaik discusses in his paper 鈥淲hatever Happened to Imperialism鈥� symbolizes the coercion of power the U.S. has over the rest of the world. A reminder that the United States could quickly get involved in smaller countries’ affairs (Patnaik, 1990). It is an effective tactic since massive amounts of weaponry can easily overpower another country or group of people.

Even more significantly, imperialism has manifested in global food systems. During the rise of the United States into its power today, there are clear examples of state-sponsored policies that changed the diets and modes of producing food. This mode of controlling and forcing people to consume food of the dominant hegemonic power has been seen throughout history, especially with indigenous peoples’ communities. An example of this state influence over food in indigenous communities is in what is now known as California; during the 1850s, with the invasion of European Americans, the people that lived in the Klamath Mountains, the Karuk People, were severely affected by the racial formations and domination for land and resources that the state was forcing upon them. The Karuk people lived near the Klamath River, and fishing was a primary form of survival in 1970. Although they had legal rights to fish in their river, state officials often arrested them for fishing, destroying their way of life and traditions. In this example, we see the state forcing people to assimilate. Since many of the Karuk people were trying not to be arrested or even killed, many of them resorted to eating government food, which lacked nutrients and was also forcing the native people to consume and engage in practices that were 鈥淲hite鈥� behaviors via boarding schools and other consumption behaviors that were not a part of their culture (Norgaard, 2011). Also, arresting the indigenous people is trying to erase the existence of these people in the first place, which is genocide continuing. This example of the Karuk people demonstrates how taking over land, either physically or legally(coercively), is perhaps a dominant way to maintain and gain control of people. The ability to own land or own the means of how food is produced is vital in being able to live healthily and sustainably. Also, food in almost any culture has significant meaning and symbolizes traditions passed down. Removing traditional food and practices removes culture and identity. If imperialism is how a state or group of people exercises control to maintain power via economic and social relations, then the first and most dominant way is to remove the ability to access resources for food. This is followed by the stripping away of culture and traditions. This happened with the Native Americans and still occurs in the global south and north today, although how those limitations exist in each may vary.

The spread of corporate power and how quickly it has dominated food and other consumed agricultural resources is also relevant to how it impacts development. Using the United States as the example in this analysis, how it produces its food and is influenced by corporate power in agricultural industries affects other developing countries where many of the subsidized crops grown here are exported. Philip McMichael highlights the corporate food regime in their analysis of food regimes and their history in the Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies by Akram-Lodhi. McMichael denotes that a corporate food regime has risen in this neoliberal era of corporate power. A food regime plagued with exporting grains and crops to developing countries while continuing its high grain growth here in the U.S. The Farm Bill heavily subsidizes corn, wheat, soy, and rice and directly fuels this. He writes

In the 1990s, trade agreements (notably the WTO and associated free trade agreements) instituted liberalization measures to universalize 鈥榤arket rule鈥� via neoliberal agricultural investment and trade freedoms for transnational agribusiness. US and European Union subsidies for agribusiness artificially cheapened foodstuffs for dumping in world markets at the expense of now unprotected Southern farmers’ (Lodhi et al., 2021).

This advanced the dominance of the United States imperial programming and subjugated developing countries into cycles of foreign debt and political unrest. Artificially deflating the price of crops, countries struggled to develop large agricultural industries and could not develop economically past the agricultural stage. The United States used this domination to convince developing countries that they could develop manufacturing and resource extraction-based industries by increasing their reliance on foreign aid and foreign investment. However, they were subordinated into global structures of domination and colonization that few countries have been able to escape. In this conceptualization of corporate food regimes, McMichael denotes how the corporate influence of power affects not only U.S. consumers but also the livelihoods of small agricultural producers, domestically and internationally. Having power over food and agriculture is a prevalent form of imperialism and capitalism, and this severely impacts the course of development. If the most basic form of sustainment is unavailable, then, from a nutrition standpoint, how can people function and live properly? Malnutrition from starvation or nutrient deficiencies severely impacts survival or health outcomes.

An example of food imperialism can be seen in Palestine, which, under its occupation, cannot control its access to land and water resources. This has led, over the decades, and more prominently now in the current crisis, to severe food insecurity and malnutrition. In the West Bank, 63% of the cultivable land is under Israeli government control, and they only have about 15% access to groundwater from the Western Aquifer Basin. In contrast, the Israeli government controls and uses the rest (~85%). Controlling land and limiting what food can be grown and imported have impacted the course of development for these people (Shaban, 2022). In the relevance and different forms that imperialism has, this is a current example of the historically brutal forms in which power is exercised over people through agriculture and food.

Seeing corporate power reflected here in the United States, we can turn to the poultry industry and labor practices that occur here in the efforts to produce massive quantities of meat and profit. In 2019, the U.S. poultry industry produced 42 billion pounds of chicken, more than any other country globally, enough to give every person on Earth about 5.32 pounds of chicken (Freshour et al. 2020). Most of the workers in the processing plants are Black, and many are ex-felons since this is one of the few industries that will hire them. Many workers are subjected to long hours of standing and monotonous work on a processing line that will often speed up, and workers must work faster to process the meat. Not only creating health issues such as arthritis but also the time taken away from these workers to rest.

Agriculture and food are areas of extreme relevance to the concept of imperialism. Manifesting through corporate power, the economic and social relations that spread hegemonic domination over agriculture and food is one of the fastest ways to extend a state鈥檚 or group’s influence over countries and people. What people need to survive more than anything is food and water. To have influence or control over how it is produced and distributed, as well as who produces and distributes it, is a clear demonstration of the relevance of the concept of imperialism. This is why steps taken to remove much of the corporate power held in the global agricultural industry are essential in creating a more just and sustainable future.

References

Akram-Lodhi, A. H., Dietz, Kristina, and Engels, Bettina, eds. 2021. Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies. Chapter 25. Food Regimes Philip McMichael, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. Accessed December 15, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Foster, John B., Utsa Patnaik, Prabhat Patnaik, Samir Amin, Intan Suwandi, Hannah Holleman, Brett Clark, Ricardo Antunes, Harry Magdoff, and Firoze Manji. 2019. 鈥�.鈥� Monthly Review.

Freshour, Carrie, Nick Estes, Roxanne Dunbar, Charisse Burden, Bill Fletcher, Lilia D. Monz贸, Jesse Benjamin, et al. 2020. 鈥�.鈥� Monthly Review.

Norgaard, K. M., Reed, R., & Van Horn, C. (2011). A continuing legacy: Institutional racism, Hunger and nutritional justice on the Klamath. in Alkon, A. H., & Agyeman, J. (Eds.). (2011). Cultivating Food Justice: Race: Class, and Sustainability. MIT Press.

O’Dell, Hope. 2023. 鈥溾�� Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Patnaik, Prabhat. 1990. 鈥溾�� Monthly Review.

Shaban, Omar. 2022. 鈥�.鈥� Arab Center Washington DC.

Mirette Nunez is a master’s student in Economics at The New School. Her research interests are in the effects of corporate power and capitalism听on global food and agriculture systems.听

By

Feeling helpless does not mean being useless. It is possible to support Palestinians from afar.

College instructors, particularly those in Europe and North America, are generally limited when it comes to meaningful intervention in imperialist horrors afflicting the Global South.  Nevertheless, it is usually their governments either orchestrating or abetting the horror.  They ought to do something, then, even if it seems pyrrhic or inadequate. 

People around the world are now witnessing a particularly gruesome event as the Zionist entity, armed by its U.S. sponsor and enjoying the support of capitalist institutions across the globe, commits one atrocity after the other in the Gaza Strip (along with the West Bank and at times further afield).  The atrocities, anyone with a modicum of integrity agrees, add up to genocide.  The depth of grief and suffering Palestinians now experience is indescribable, immeasurable. 

Do professors and other campus workers have any ability to mitigate the grief and suffering?  Not really.  But we鈥檙e not entirely powerless, either.  Higher education is an important sector for information and activism and an industry where participants like to contemplate the role of both exceptional and ordinary people in making a better world.  Like anybody else, teachers and researchers can be most effective in their own communities, which are not inoculated from the genocide.  Zionist groups have organized hundreds of defamation campaigns against Palestinian students and faculty, often resulting in employment termination and other serious forms of recrimination.  These campaigns don鈥檛 exist in a vacuum.  Targeting Palestinians and anti-Zionists is an extension of the genocide, or at least one of its attendant tactics.  And then, of course, many of the campuses are somehow invested in the Zionist entity鈥攆inancially, politically, or logistically.  It does no good to say that 鈥渨e鈥� aren鈥檛 affected by what happens 鈥渢here.鈥� 

The following is a list of suggestions for Western academics, with the understanding that not all professors are equal and each campus is different in terms of its cultural and economic composition.  In turn, I have tried to be comprehensive, offering comments that I hope will be useful to everyone from contingent faculty whose employment is precarious to senior scholars with big platforms at elite institutions.  (The latter are much more likely to be facilitating the genocide, either obliquely or explicitly, but nevertheless.) 

One thing is clear:  the world is now experiencing a moral crisis whose enormity will reshape political attitudes and alliances for generations to come.  Pretending that life, no matter how sheltered or comfortable, can simply continue as normal is its own kind of moral crisis. 

Try one or more of the following if you can: 

Defend Palestinian Students:  Be it from forces on or off campus, or be it individuals you know or don鈥檛 know personally, it is reprehensible that students should suffer doxing and harassment, whether it is orchestrated by skeezy has-beens like  or  on their own campus.  Speak on behalf of your students.  It can be done publicly through the usual channels or in private communication with chairs, deans, and other administrators.  Or keep it simpler:  reach out to the students and offer yourself as a resource. 

Defend Palestinian Colleagues:  The same idea holds, but with a quick addendum.  Being a Palestinian in Western academe can be deeply alienating, in no small part because shitting on Palestinians is a reliable method of upward mobility.  I鈥檓 sure some of your Palestinian colleagues will appreciate any gesture that might make them feel slightly less alone. 

Boycott:  Up to this point, academic boycott of Israeli universities has been controversial, even in supposedly progressive quarters of the industry.  The facts, however, are clear.  Israel has destroyed every institution of higher learning in the Gaza Strip.  It has murdered dozens of faculty and administrators, including university presidents, and an untold number of students.  There is no academic freedom in Palestine.  There is no academe at all in Gaza.  Reluctance to boycott is no longer acceptable.  It is the baseline of political decency.  Anybody who continues to oppose or dissemble about academic boycott should be regarded as untrustworthy on everything else. 

Divest:  Start or join a local campaign to force your university to divest any holdings from the Zionist entity.  Divestment can include study abroad programs in Israel, which inherently discriminate against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students.  In the past decade, students have successfully passed divestment resolutions at numerous universities, but management simply ignores them.  Faculty voices will help these efforts. 

Invite People from Gaza:  Surely the rank-and-file in academe are tired of the same few dozen big-name professors and celebrity activists saying the same three or four things in the lucrative lecture economy.  Decisionmakers on campus invite speakers for prestige, for the brand, or else to network or be in the presence of fame.  The habit needs to die and there鈥檚 no better time than now.  Instead of summoning the usual Endowed Chair of Gobbledygook at Wealthy Private University to deliver radical affectations at a cost of multiple thousands, reach out to scholars and journalists from Gaza (and for God鈥檚 sake give them a proper honorarium).  They will assuredly be more insightful than warmed-over relics of the pre-millennial theory craze.  Likewise:  recruit graduate students from Palestine.  You can also look into bringing Palestinians as visiting writers/scholars or as researchers/consultants in any effort to document the genocide.  Start with people who are currently outside of Gaza; when conditions are better, reach out to those still inside the territory.  Gaza is filled with individuals of remarkable talent.  You will be better off for having sought it. 

Organize or Attend a Demonstration:  You don鈥檛 need to be a seasoned organizer to raise hell about the abomination that is the Zionist entity. 

Direct Action:  Why should students always be the ones to shut down administrative offices or gum up the machinery of genocide?  Professors can participate, as well.  I鈥檓 not saying you need to do it.  I just want you to bear in mind that nobody, no matter how urbane or well-published, is too good to get fired or sit in jail for a few hours in solidarity with a people whose heroism is known and admired around the world. 

Teach Palestine:  Hundreds of Palestinian poets, novelists, and essayists write in English or are available in translation.  Consider including them on your syllabus.  So what if your courses don鈥檛 focus on Palestine or the surrounding region?  If you鈥檙e a modernist, then assign Fadwa Tuqan or Mahmoud Darwish.  If you鈥檙e in gender studies, look up Fatima Bernawi or Rasmea Odeh.  If you teach novels, try Susan Abulhawa, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Sahar Mustafah鈥n goes the list.  If you鈥檙e an Americanist, there are numerous options.  Same for Latin Americanists.  A critical theorist?  No problem:  there鈥檚 Elias Sanbar and Bassel Al-Araj and Ghassan Kanafani.  And if you鈥檙e, say, a medievalist?  That鈥檚 , either. 

Stop Pandering to Customs of Civility:  You don鈥檛 need to condemn 鈥淗amas.鈥�  You don鈥檛 need to 鈥渁ffirm Israel鈥檚 right to exist.鈥�  You don鈥檛 need to bang on about 鈥渄emocratic values.鈥�  You don鈥檛 need to be 鈥渘uanced.鈥�  You need to defend the people suffering a genocide.  Not a single one of them is asking for anything else.  (鈥淲ho is my audience?鈥� keep asking yourself.  If the answer is anything other than 鈥渢he dispossessed,鈥� then recalibrate your ethics and try again.) 

Shun the Genocidaires:  Those rationalizing or cheering on the genocide are personae non grata from here on out.  No co-authoring articles with them.  No sitting together on conference panels.  No buddy-buddy bullshit on the networking circuit.  Sure, sometimes circumstance will force you onto the same committee or whatever, but, if the association is voluntary, then decline the opportunity and find colleagues who don鈥檛 celebrate mass murder. 

Speak:  [speak] 

Or better still:听听Listen.

This post was initially posted on .

The on-going ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in 2023, marks the end of the fa莽ade of the peaceful Western liberal order. At least  people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. While these countries were subject to the different ebbs and flows of US imperial violence. Palestinians have paid the heaviest price.  The historical occupation of Palestine has always been a socio-economic precondition for the cohesion of the but the current ethnic cleansing can no longer be contained through the usual narrative control tools and an ever intensifying climate of fear promulgated to the ends of silencing and chilling legitimate support for Palestine internationally. As notes, the genocide has shown us that 鈥�Impunity isn鈥檛 beholden to disapproval鈥�, and we continue to bear witness to the genocide for ourselves and for the next generation. The current genocide is the clearest expression of the decrepitude of the Western order in a state of ongoing entropy. What follows shall be bereaved of the usual pretences of 鈥榙emocracy鈥� and 鈥榟uman rights鈥� and thus more naked, brutal and yet more reactionary. The Western order is generating the conditions for its demise. In this, Palestine leads the way. Palestine changes everything.

A New World Order: No more Gas-lighting

The Palestinian struggle reverberates across rule-setting institutions and yet again highlights the abject failure of multilateralism. After months of expressing 鈥榮hock鈥�, 鈥榬egret鈥�, and 鈥榗ondemnation鈥�, and hackneyed references to the 鈥榮taggering and unacceptable number of civilian casualties鈥� in Palestine, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter, to scale up the provision of humanitarian supplies for Gazan civilians.

This was done after 58 days of targeted and deliberate killing of civilians resulting in the murder of around 20,000 Palestinians. In addition to bombing residential areas, key targets were hospitals, schools and places of worship. According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, as reported by , around 70% of Gaza鈥檚 dead were women and children under the age of 18.

In invoking Article 99, Guterras rightly states that such has been done for the first time, during his tenure as Secretary General. What he doesn鈥檛 mention or even allude to, is that a resort to humanitarian intervention is not just an inadequate distraction from accountability, but additionally is yet another measure, which ultimately only reinforces US power.

The U.S has now twice vetoed Security Council resolutions calling for pauses in the fighting, to allow for humanitarian assistance. That the World鈥檚 largest military power is allowed to veto against a ceasefire in an on-going genocide, speaks volumes about the institutional power of the UN. Moreover, as always a singular emphasis on humanitarian approaches to the Palestinian occupation, moves the narrative away from the political. This is a textbook case for invoking the and the convention is clear in its obligations, which:

“establishes on State Parties the obligation to take measures to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide, including by enacting relevant legislation and punishing perpetrators, 鈥渨hether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals鈥� (Article IV). That obligation, in addition to the prohibition not to commit genocide, have been considered as norms of international customary law and therefore, binding on all States, whether or not they have ratified the Genocide Convention.”

Feminist organisations based in the Global South  have called upon the , to invoke this convention. While there are on-going attempts amongst UN member states, to counter the US opposition to ceasefire, the fact remains the UN needs to address its institutional purpose; it cannot present itself as the sum of its member states, whilst these member states, continue to defer to the will of only one state. At this point in time, nothing but the Genocide Cconvention can secure the credibility of the UN as the UN鈥檚 current failure to protect Palestinians is not an unlikely exception to the history of previous UN operations – but  the function of an organised pattern. As noted by , the planned reconstruction of Gaza, in the aftermath of three major wars on Gaza (2008鈥�9, 2012, and 2014), led by the UN, as the main enforcer of the siege, was crucial in enabling the consolidation of the Israeli stranglehold over the region. Beyond Palestine, the UN鈥檚 role in countries across the world has been far from stabilising.  Some key historical events, which stand out include the and   Additionally, in the context of Haiti, has shown how immunity from prosecution, has allowed UN bodies to effectively abscond from any realistic accountability.

Meanwhile, Israel is openly threatening both the UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC) as it bulldozes through every international rule. Israeli impunity is served by America鈥檚 domestic and foreign policy; the US Congressional for instance, now equates anti-Zionism to anti-semitism and the US continues to frustrate and block all policy passages to any multilateral resolution for a ceasefire.

Palestine as a microcosm of struggles against Western Imperialism

The Palestinian resistance is a people鈥檚 right to self-determination; it has been constant, unrelenting and as with any struggle for independence, is also rife with contradictions. But these contradictions are never portrayed as a product of choiceless-ness. Instead, as explored by , the framing of a people鈥檚 historic resistance is presented as a monstrous nightmare designed to haunt and obstruct any alternative ways of thinking about Palestinians and in doing so, maintains an unwavering commitment to the existing status-quo. While the message is always that the issue is 鈥榗omplicated鈥�, it is – concurrently and antithetically sold as an overly simplistic and an easily digestible narrative of murderous and tactless Arab villains.

This time, the narrative has been cheapened by the sheer scale of atrocity. While the West-centred intellectual praxis is centred around certain myths about what the World can and cannot do for the colonised, the brutality of Israeli genocide in Palestine has amplified the necessity of Palestinian resistance; it is now being echoed in the streets of every country, including in the and  no amount of , can legislate reality away.

More than ever, this is a reminder of why the Palestinian resistance has always been integral to the anti-colonial struggles of the third world. The Palestinian genocide is a rare moment of clarity, which very starkly accentuates the very contemporary nature of Western colonialism.

The Corporality of Financial Capital and International Development  

Most analysis on the rise of financial capitalism and deindustrialisation in the West, is presented as a process of unrelenting deterritorialization. This idea is concerned with analysing the causes of oppression of the Western working classes, often encapsulated in terms such as 鈥榓usterity鈥�. In these approaches financialisation is often presented as an abstraction; an acceleration of neoliberalism and an unbridled stage of capitalism. What takes place in the third world as a driving source of financialisation is often observed as peripheral to such analyses.  In fact, the financial subordination of the third world has been actively accompanied by its annihilation.

In comparison to any other occupied nation in recent history, Palestine has shown time-and-time again that it is the concrete territory, in which the Western arms race is realised. The deindustrialisation of the West is not accompanied by a decline but an escalation of production in arms, with the . The corporeality of this productive power has always been realised and is acutely visible in dead and maimed bodies of Palestinians. The has consistently substantiated and reproduced itself in  American support for Israel. In the historical and comparative case of the Arab world, has noted that the:

“Arab world exhibits higher rates of surplus value creation relative to its population because the premature elimination of human lives in war is a far higher rate of surplus value creation than that of the slow consumption of labour power.”

This assertion is met with scepticism by some in the West, however, we find no alternative answers to the question of why certain territories and geographies consistently deal with dead civilians?

Palestine has also been the most consistent site for US-led global humanitarianism efforts, as it is simultaneously and relentlessly bombed. It is the quintessential poster-child for the mobilisation neoliberal jargon and double-speak such as reconstruction, rehabilitation and even resilience. All these words encompass the interplay between violence and Western humanitarianism; American arms to Israel and American aid to Palestine are provided simultaneously with no contradiction in foreign diplomacy nor with any concern for humanity. As Palestinians suffer acute starvation and homelessness alongside constant bombing, the focus of the global humanitarian movement is on providing aid and ending starvation.  The cyclicality of the development paradigm is thus self-perpetuating.

In confronting this notion of development, previously proposed a reframing of development as resistance and struggle, which entails asserting the unity of Palestinians as a whole; rejecting the narrowing of the Palestinian question to the West Bank and Gaza and also including the Palestinian refugees, diaspora and those who now have Israeli citizenship. In more than one way, this proposal has been brought to the centre by the perpetrators of this Western-sanctioned Nakba 2.0. For the victims of the War on Terror specifically and also those in confrontation with the everyday violence of imperialism, the sanctity of international institutions, international law and liberal governance have always been a ruse for softening the image of violence. Palestinian genocide and Palestinian resistance has firmly changed this.  And so the veil has been lifted and there is no way of undoing what has been being done. Palestine changes everything; 鈥� the message to the third world is that as the empire hollows, falters and fails, its flailing impunity is boundless and anyone can be next. While the bravery of Palestinian journalists and activists expose the future of third world. Hiding and censoring this has been the precise role of mainstream journalism.

Palestinians have said over and over again that they do not want to be forgotten, as the faceless casualties of Israel. 鈥�I am not a number鈥�. They claim their identities as well as their generational struggle. In a hyper-individuated world, the sheer strength and resolve of Palestinians to resist while knowing the inevitability of a painful death as a collective, defies the capitalist rationality of individual self-interest, self-protection and fetishised survival of the fittest. This is not emotional bravado but a political act for a shared future. They show us the meaning of a collective struggle for a historic cause. They show us that land and sovereign rights to live as a nation remain central to all liberation movements. For our sake, we can stand with them.

From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free. Long live Palestine.   

听is a Research Associate at the Department of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Her research focuses on the changing nature of capitalist development in context to imperialism with expertise in areas including development finance, comparative development and industrial policy. She tweets at .

Read the piece in Arabic:

The great cultural theorist Stuart Hall called Frantz Fanon鈥檚 The Wretched of the Earth 鈥榯he bible of decolonisation鈥� as it encapsulated the urge for freedom across the colonial world (). Fanon illuminates how racism represented an organising principle for capitalist classes by systematically devaluing the lives of the majority of the world鈥檚 population. 鈥楩or centuries the capitalists have behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world,鈥� he wrote. 鈥楧eportation, massacres, forced labour, and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to increase its gold and diamond reserves, and establish its wealth and power鈥� ().

One of the reasons for Fanon鈥檚 popularity among those who want to decolonise development is that he argued that post-colonial countries should forge their own paths to development rather than attempting to follow already developed countries. 鈥楾he Third World must not be content to define itself in relation to values which preceded it,鈥� he warned. 鈥橭n the contrary, the underdeveloped countries must endeavour to focus on their very own values as well as methods and style specific to them.鈥�

Not only did Fanon explain the horrors inflicted by colonialism upon native populations; crucially, he also conceived of real human development as a process rooted in a collective labouring class (comprising workers and poor peasants) transcending capitalist brutality.

However these two elements of his thought 鈥� the critical identification of the violence of colonialism, and a real human developmental alternative to it 鈥� have often been disconnected by thinkers influential to the decolonial movement. This represents a dangerous misinterpretation of Fanon. It obscures his vision of a decolonised world and the social forces able to construct it.

鈥楲ittle indication鈥�

The  to decolonise development and development studies draws upon a variety of prior intellectual movements, especially from cultural and post-colonial studies. It uncovers the violent and ideological processes by which Indigenous voices were and still are marginalised by Northern powers. It challenges the ideology and practice of economic growth based catch-up development (where poorer countries squeeze their populations to raise the resources to become like richer countries). It reveals and counters the racism within universities and other key institutions. It calls, increasingly, for  to redress the damage wrought by slavery.

All these elements are foreshadowed in Fanon鈥檚 work 鈥� but he provided much more than this. However, some influential thinkers elevate Fanon鈥檚 critique of colonial capitalism, whilst demoting and misinterpreting his Marxist socialism. By doing so, they are providing a one-sided, lifeless portrayal of Fanon鈥檚 purpose. For example, in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Robert Young misinterprets Fanon鈥檚 politics by equating them with violent Maoism, whilst ignoring his vision of post-colonial socialist development: 鈥榃hat is noticeable about the FLN and Fanon鈥檚 position is that it is predicated on an espousal of the virtues and necessity of violence, with little indication of what the free society that was to follow liberation was to be like鈥� ().

In his Culture and Imperialism, the great Palestinian activist-scholar Edward Said argues that Fanon fails to offer 鈥榓 prescription for making a transition after decolonisation to a period … [of] a new political order鈥� ().

Why are these writers so quick to disassociate Fanon鈥檚 critique of colonialism from his advocacy of anti-colonial socialist development? The answer may have to do with the fact they were more conservative than Fanon. Said, for example, draws on Fanon as part of his broader argument for (non-socialist) Palestinian nation-building, while Young is writing primarily for academic purposes.

In fact, Fanon鈥檚 advocacy of a 鈥榥ew humanism鈥� was central to his analysis of the historical moment of decolonisation. It combines the longer tradition of socialism from below 鈥� combatting and transcending capitalist exploitation through labouring class struggle and eventual control over the means of production 鈥� with a radical and highly original vision of a post-racial, post-patriarchal, post-alienated world.

Fanon鈥檚 new humanism

Frantz Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth, first published in French in 1961, in a race against time, while he was dying from leukaemia. He died, tragically young, shortly after its publication. There was another reason for his urgency. The Algerian revolution against French rule stood at the gates of victory. However, with great perspicacity Fanon saw the dangers 鈥� of renewed elite, albeit now African, rule 鈥� that potentially lay ahead for the Algerian people and other soon-to-be liberated colonised peoples.

Fanon was inspired by Marx, but he was also disillusioned with the way Marxism had become stultified under the influence of Stalinism. The French Parti Communiste (PCF) approach to the Algerian revolution was national chauvinist rather than revolutionary communist. It characterised much of the revolution as acts of individual terrorists, supporting the French prime minster Guy Mollet鈥檚 1956 bill giving the government 鈥榮pecial powers鈥� in Algeria. These included a massive call up of reservists and the suspension of civil liberties in Algeria. More generally it  by workers in the first world over anti-imperialist workers movements in the emergent 鈥榯hird world鈥�.

In part because of the PCF鈥檚 reactionary Marxism, and like many revolutionaries before him, Fanon adapted, or in his words 鈥榮tretched鈥�, Marxism. He wrote The Wretched of the Earth to address the character of exploitation and oppression under capitalist colonialism in Algeria, the possibilities of a socialist revolution and the kinds of new humanist development that could flow from it. The book contains a dual critique 鈥� of the French colonial regime and of emerging post-colonial African elites 鈥� including obliquely, of the increasingly conservative military leadership of the Front de Lib茅ration Nationale.

The European masses must first of all decide to wake up, put on their thinking caps and stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping BeautyFrantz Fanon

For Fanon, a revolution 鈥� by the masses for the masses 鈥� had a triple role: to generate a thoroughgoing decolonisation, to transcend attempts by nationalist elites to capture the revolution and to enable the masses to realise their capacity to establish an historically novel form of democratic development. He hoped that this revolutionary force would unleash the cooperative spirit necessary for the emergence of a new humanism. Without it, he predicted that decolonisation would descend into a situation of renewed elite rule which he characterised as 鈥榓 sort of little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it. This get-rich-quick middle class shows itself incapable of great ideas or of inventiveness. It remembers what it has read in European textbooks and imperceptibly it becomes not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature.鈥�

Fanon鈥檚 identification of the peasantry as agents of revolutionary change was formed over the course of the Algerian revolution. From 1954, great numbers of the Algerian poor pitted themselves against a French colonial settler state for which the murder of civilians and the use of torture in concentration camps was . While they fought valiantly, they bore heavy losses. By late 1957 the French army had defeated the FLN in urban warfare, portrayed by the Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo鈥檚 The Battle of Algiers.

It was in this context 鈥� of the defeat of the urban working-class sections of the Algerian revolution 鈥� that University of Illinois professor Lou Turner argues Fanon 鈥榯urned to the peasantry鈥� (). In part because of his advocacy of peasant revolution, Fanon has been associated by writers like Robert Young with Maoism 鈥� but this is a profoundly inaccurate interpretation.

He wrote Wretched just as news of Mao鈥檚 murderous great leap forward was filtering out of China and much of it is  of Maoist-style policies. His argument that the 鈥榥otion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him鈥� can be interpreted as being directed as much against Mao鈥檚 regime as it was against the increasingly conservative Arab Nationalist elites, including the FLN.

Indeed it was the FLN leadership, not Fanon,  with Mao, receiving weapons from the People鈥檚 Republic of China via anti-working class Arab Nationalist regimes such as Gamal Abdel Nasser鈥檚 Egypt. Fanon鈥檚 advocacy of the peasantry as a mass revolutionary subject was qualitatively different from Mao鈥檚 which conceived of them as supporters of the revolutionary guerrilla army but not revolutionaries themselves. Furthermore, contrary to Mao, Fanon advocated an alliance between the Algerian peasantry and western workers.

Unlike many revolutionaries then and now, Fanon鈥檚 was not a male-orientated vision of social change. He argued that Algerian women were 鈥榝ighting two colonialisms鈥� 鈥� of Muslim and Western patriarchy. Furthermore, he advocated that women 鈥榮hall be given equal importance to men, not in the articles of the constitution, but in daily life, at the factory, in the schools, and in assemblies鈥�.

For the disinherited and by the disinherited

Part of this emancipatory dynamic would be a radically new form of development, distinct from emerging forms of top-down Arab and African socialism and nationalism. 鈥業f the national government wants to be national it must govern by the people and for the people, for the disinherited and by the disinherited.鈥� Resource nationalisation 鈥榤ust not take on the aspect of rigid state control鈥� as in the then-Soviet bloc and emergent independent African states. Rather, to 鈥榥ationalize the tertiary sector means organizing democratically the cooperatives for buying and selling. It means decentralizing these cooperatives by involving the masses in the management of public affairs.鈥� Yet this could be only the start. 鈥橳he choice of a socialist regime, a regime entirely devoted to the people, based on the principle that man is the most precious asset, will allow us to progress faster in greater harmony, consequently ruling out the possibility of a caricature of society where a privileged few hold the reins of political and economic power without a thought for the nation as a whole.鈥�

Fanon noted how post-Nazi Germany continued to apologise for the Nazi genocide and agreed to pay significant reparations to Israel. He advocated a similar programme of reparations, rather than aid, from former colonial countries to post-colonial countries to begin redressing the damage they had caused.

Also read Elikia M鈥檅okolo, 鈥溾��,&苍产蝉辫;Le Monde diplomatique, April 1998.Fanon expounded a labouring class socialist internationalism which, unlike Maoism, included a key role for the European working classes. 鈥楾his colossal task, which consists of reintroducing man into the world, man in his totality, will be achieved with the crucial help of the European masses who would do well to confess that they have often rallied behind the position of our common masters on colonial issues. In order to do this, the European masses must first of all decide to wake up, put on their thinking caps and stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty.鈥�

Fanon鈥檚 new humanist development was based on a decentralised cooperative conception of the economy, rather than one based on private property or state-direction. It looked to a future of human relations free from the burdens of racism, patriarchy and capitalist exploitation. But for such a society to emerge he advocated a revolution by the masses which was sufficiently powerful to simultaneously eliminate colonial rule and bring to bear a new humanist subject of development.

Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth as a warning that the Algerian revolution itself was fated to follow other recently decolonised African societies, characterised by the emergence of oppressive states managed by newly independent nationalist elites. Indeed, his warnings about the politically narrow vision of the emergent post-colonial elites were amply confirmed. Upon independence in March 1962, French settlers fled Algeria abandoning their farms and factories. For three years workers managed many of these urban factories and farms. In June 1965 the conservative military wing of the FLN under Houari Boum茅di猫ne staged a coup, putting paid to attempts at socialist economic transformation.

Today, the increased interest in, and attempts to decolonise, development reflect the gross inequalities of the contemporary moment, the increasingly widespread realisation of how these are rooted in capitalism鈥檚 deep history and a growing movement for a more equitable world. While Frantz Fanon is one of the key figures invoked in this movement, it is important to emphasise that his critique of capitalist colonialism was part and parcel of his advocacy of a new humanist form of development 鈥� a vision and a democratising strategy based on workers鈥� and peasants鈥� mass collective action against capitalist exploitation. Otherwise we risk undermining the kinds of transformative social struggles required to make racism, patriarchy and class exploitation relics of history.

Photo: Frantz Fanon at a press conference during a writers鈥� conference in Tunis, 1959.

Benjamin Selwyn听is a professor of international relations and international development at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His publications include The Struggle for Development (Polity Press: 2017).

Ben Selwyn鈥檚 article 鈥�De/Recolonising Development: Fanon, Rostow, and the Violence of Social Change鈥櫶�is available open access/free of charge at:听

This article was first published in .

A new calendar year ushers in the usual array of tropes on Africa. They include why the continent is failing, what it should be doing better and why it has so much resilience in dealing with its own frailty. Overwhelmingly, Western institutions (NGOs, credit rating agencies, etc.) repeat tired mantras of the international 铿乶ancial institutions, ignoring the insights of African scholar activists and the historical backdrop to the continent鈥檚 contemporary crises. Neglect of such analysis leads to the failure to understand why and how different African countries are in the mess that they are and why the mess has structural continuities and conjunctural discontinuities. The antidote to Western-centric analysis is the superb collection of essays in a special issue of Africa Development, a journal of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), which emerged from the Post-Colonialisms Today project. The range and insight of the collection is difficult to capture in a short review, but there are two continuous themes among contributors: the importance of revisiting the historical past and the signi铿乧ance of sovereignty, or the absence of it.

The collection challenges 鈥渢he continued hegemony of neoliberalism in policymaking in Africa鈥� (Hormeku-Ajei et al. , 4). The introduction notes the amnesia about how early post-independence leaders tried to secure the 鈥渘ewly-won freedom of their countries through policies that were designed 鈥� to promote autonomous development processes anchored on the demands and needs of a home market鈥� (1). Nyerere, for example, rebuked the IFIs when they accused him of failure, noting that at independence 85% of Tanzania was illiterate and they had just two trained engineers and 12 medical doctors 鈥� after 43 years of British colonial rule. Under Nyerere, Tanzania ensured 91% literacy, that all children were in school and that per capita income grew dramatically. After reluctantly accepting IFI diktats, key social and economic indices plummeted. In discrediting the first 20 years of autonomous and autochthonous African post-independence development policy and strategy, the IFIs provided a narrative to justify what became the ruinous years of structural adjustment. While the heart of the neoliberal project is to discredit African strategy and practice, this collection highlights that the idea of African post-independence failure was manufactured and 鈥渄eliberately misleading鈥� (2).

The 铿乺st 20 years of post-independence Africa had promise and were in铿倁ential in trying to reverse the colonial inheritance: African, mostly radical, leaders were often successful, even if for a brief period of time, in addressing political and economic fragmentation (especially reliance on primary commodity exports). The authors of this collection explore how several African leaders recognised their country鈥檚 subordinate position in the global system and understood the importance of assembling African agency to address and change that relationship. A unifying theme in the collection is that 鈥淸d]ecolonisation across Africa brought about historical changes; it was a moment of solidarity, optimism, and radical rethinking of political and economic systems鈥� (Salem , 160). Contemporary rearticulation of colonial relationships has reproduced the problem of earlier independence leaders, who sought to reduce dependence upon former colonial powers by promoting nation building, industrialisation, economic and agricultural diversi铿乧ation, pan-Africanism, and the development of a new economic order. 

Jimi Adesina examines the pan-African agenda, reviewing variations and similarities of Senghor, Nyerere, and Nkrumah in their approaches to socialism, pan-African unity, nationhood, economic development, epistemology and democracy. In their different ways, the three African leaders each tried to develop, coordinate, and mobilise the full range of domestic resources to reduce dependence on external interests and maintain sovereignty. Adesina emphasizes the crucial Nyerere leitmotif 鈥渦nity鈥� (49) and obstacles to it, including the variable capacity across the continent to challenge imperialism. He highlights the importance of not reifying African leaders, the 鈥渄iversity of postcolonial imaginations鈥� (52), and that, quoting Nyerere, 鈥渢he sin of despair would be the most unforgivable鈥� (54). But so too would be an optimism that is not grounded in analysis of existing radical social forces and the power of imperialism. Unless imperialism is understood and challenged, new agendas for pan-Africanism, sovereign national projects, and policy autonomy will wither on the proverbial vine.

Kareem Megahed and Omar Ghannam review Nasser鈥檚 attempt to industrialise Egypt鈥檚 economy as a way of challenging imperial interests. They argue that, while new incumbents of the Nasserist state often used words like 鈥榮ocialism鈥� and 鈥榩lanning鈥�, they 鈥渄id not actually, as is commonly believed, implement a central planning nor a socialist approach鈥� (67). Nasser鈥檚 land reform and new tenancy laws transformed large sections of rural Egypt while leaving the property, rights, power, and influence of old feudal elites intact. Megahed and Ghannam provide a useful re铿俥ction on the external and internal limitations of Nasser鈥檚 postcolonial project, noting the inherited restricted industrial base and the need for increased investment. Their biggest critique is that Nasser 鈥渁ttempted to give workers a measure of economic freedom and progress without giving them the political means to protect these very gains鈥� (89). One of the reasons why the project fell apart, despite gains in productivity and improvement in the well-being of the poor, 鈥渨as the lagging of democratic workers鈥� representation, which allowed the project to be hijacked鈥� by imperial powers (92). 

Akua Britwum draws attention to the under-researched importance of agricultural transformation in challenging uneven incorporation into global capitalism and plotting a strategy for sovereignty. She explores this topic through the cases of Ghana and Tanzania, reminding readers of the key strategic potential of the state in production, distribution and employment creation. Britwum draws important connections to contemporary African development constraints, noting how the absence of sovereignty continues and is evident in the 鈥渇ailure to fully de-link national economies from the global capitalist political economy that had positioned African countries as primary producers鈥� (128). This means that dependence on 鈥渆arnings from cash crop exports to 铿乶ance development expenditure鈥� (128) remains, limiting any in铿倁ence the state might be able to exert over productive resources. Britwum is scathing about the failure of independence to reduce patriarchy and the development plans鈥� failure to recognise that gendered strati铿乧ation is 鈥渋nimical to national development鈥� (133). However, she makes clear that there are positive lessons for development planning from the Ghanaian and Tanzanian experiences, such as 鈥渢heir sturdy ideological focus that led them to prioritise domestic needs鈥�; the state鈥檚 role as a 鈥減rincipal economic actor鈥�; and their focus on agriculture (130). Nkrumah and Nyerere鈥檚 imperatives of African socialism provided an important, although not long lasting, 鈥渋deological grounding in the imperative for African socialism鈥� (131).

Cha铿乲 Ben Rouine reminds us of before neoliberalism, when countries鈥� central banks helped mobilise resources to facilitate post-independence agrarian reforms and industrial strategy. Ben Rouine highlights the historical success of Tunisia鈥檚 central bank in mobilising, controlling, and channeling credit to the needs of the national economy. He notes how the 1960s was a period when the state tried to develop a vision of decolonisation and self-centred development, though it ultimately floundered due to 鈥渢rust in external 铿乶ancial support, an overly centralised bureaucracy鈥� that did not understand the speci铿乧ity of Tunisian agriculture, and 鈥渁 vision of development too focused on the West鈥� (156). Tunisia鈥檚 limited but important attempt at greater autonomy from the world capitalist system ended after structural adjustment began in 1986 and neoliberalism destroyed central bank independence.

The volume is tied together by Sara Salem鈥檚 contribution on radical regionalism, feminism, sovereignty and the pan-African project. She argues that sovereignty in the immediate post-independence period was seen as a regional, pan-African, internationalist project of decolonisation.  Salem highlights the role that African feminists had in shaping policy that challenged colonial structures of global capital, including policies of industrialisation and nationalisation to promote independent development. She shows the important role that 鈥渞egionalism鈥� played in this, which for Salem refers to 鈥渢he Third Worldist belief in various decolonised regions coming together to confront colonial capitalism鈥� and is part of emerging pan-Africanism (160鈥�161). Salem鈥檚 analysis pushes contemporary pan-Africanism to explore 鈥渞adical regionalism鈥� and feminist contributions to 鈥渃onceptualise agency and sovereignty and incorporate gender into debates around African independence鈥� (162). 

The lessons in this collection apply to understanding the constraints and opportunities for meaningful African sovereignty in the twenty-铿乺st century. They are salutary and somewhat depressing, re铿俥cting on the ways in which attempts at autonomous postcolonial development were knocked back by the forces of imperialism. Yet they also provide the tools for understanding and confronting contemporary imperialism, reminding us of the need to interrogate the mantras of the IFIs and the triad of the US, EU and Japan. 

Ray Bush is Professor Emeritus of African Studies and Development Politics at the University of Leeds and Briefings and Debates Editor of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE).

* A more detailed version of this review is available as: Bush, R. (2023). ‘Africa Development’, Review of African Political Economy, 50(175), pp. 138-142. DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2023.2240674.

** Post-Colonialisms Today (PCT) is a research and advocacy project housed at and led by African activist-intellectuals recovering progressive policies from early post-independence Africa, and mobilizing them through a feminist lens to address contemporary challenges.  PCT released a special issue in the Africa Development journal () in 2022.

Photo of Nyerere’s statue in Dodoma by .

In Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Matteo Capasso provides an alternative analysis of Libya鈥檚 history and regime under Colonel Gaddafi leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. The book offers a compelling counterargument to the mainstream narrative of Libya as a stateless, authoritarian and rogue state by focusing on international and geopolitical dynamics impacting Libya鈥檚 governance.

Q.1 Your book argues against the dominant western analysis of Libya under Colonel Gaddafi as a dictatorship, completely dependent on its economic legitimacy from oil. To quote:

鈥�This book has cautioned readers from rushing to define the Jamahiriya as an umpteenth authoritarian regime in the Arab world that crushes and controls its people. The significance of this issue lies in how the increasing repressible characteristic of the regime inevitably reflected wider power鈥�. 

What do you mean by wider power dynamics?

When you pick any book on the political history of Libya, you are bound to encounter the argument that Qaddafi鈥檚 Libya (not the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya or the Libyan government) was a stateless society, governed ruthlessly by a dictator who was aiming to disrupt the US-led international order.听 In the book, I define these arguments as a conceptual tryptic, including the ideas of statelessness, authoritarianism and rogue state. The book starts off questioning the use of these analytical frameworks and instead proposes to address questions of political legitimacy and authority via the study of the everyday. To do so, however, brought me to face another problem, namely the fact that most academic studies approach the 鈥榚veryday鈥� with an overemphasis on the agency and power of the people. This, in turn, has led to dismiss a bit too quickly the impact of global and structural factors; and this is where I come to answer your question. While the everyday gained prominence and became a privileged site for studying politics in the Arab region, especially in the aftermath of the 2011 mass uprisings, these analyses 听remain disconnected from long-standing international dynamics of politics and political economy. In other worlds, how were these states integrated in the wider international political economy? Did the political projects pursued by the Libyan government, especially in the aftermath of the 1969 revolution, challenge the interests of Western geopolitical forces? Why was Libya progressively subject to military assaults and geopolitical pressure?听 If one ignores鈥攔ather conveniently鈥攖hese aspects, it ends up to square one, basically explaining the politics of the country as the result of internal factors. In this manner, one not only delinks the socio-political formation of countries in the Global South from the international world, but also ends up flattening out its hierarchies existing.

Q.2 How can al-Fatih鈥檚 policies be described as anti-imperial and the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC)鈥檚 governance model as socialist? Can we argue that government-led accumulation and despotism simultaneously have a more macro vision of anti-imperialism? Some would say this is a contradiction.

This is a great question, Farwa. I think there are two fundamental points to be raised in order to answer it. First, there is the question of time, which entails providing an analytical explanation to the gradual transformation of al-Fatih. The government was neither despotic nor socialist from beginning to end. In forty-two years, major political and economic changes took place, which reflected the necessities to manoeuvre a changing international order, i.e., the unipolar rise of the US, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of political Islam in the region, and so on.

For instance, whereas the Libyan government tried to pursue and implement redistributive policies and projects of regional cooperation in the first two decades after the 1969 revolution, these policies were gradually reversed by the late 1980s. The revolution had struggled to overcome its dependency on oil revenues, and the working masses had not become self-productive. At the same time, the military confrontation with the West, as well as the imposition of the sanctions created the necessary grounds for delegitimizing the Libyan government at home and abroad, thus defeatism鈥攏ot revolution鈥� became the name of the game. Yet, while the funding and support of liberation movements鈥攁nd by this, I mean the use of direct violence鈥攈ad been a major goal pursued by the RCC, it changed completely in the 1990s. By then, Libya was pursuing a strategy of what we now call as 鈥榤ultipolarity鈥�, namely diversifying its own political-economic integration and alliances, with a specific focus on the African continent. As you can see, these are two different strategies of anti-imperialist policies, which show the necessity to adapt oneself to the changing geopolitical system, but also produce very different results.

Second, contradictions will always be present; yet, as Mao-Tse Dong would argue, what form they take is as fundamental. There is no doubt that the thirteen-years military debacle in Chad, one of the most understudied proxy wars, gave a major blow to the Libyan government. Faced by a military alliance combining Western geopolitical forces (France and the US) together with Israel, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, what were the prospects of coming victorious from that war? Did the Libyan government miscalculate its strategy in Chad? Similarly, if the events of 2011, as history has shown us, turned out to be an imperialist aggression against Libya, why did the Libyan public struggle largely to grasp its nature? As I show in Chapter 3, the ideological and educational grip of the government over the population had progressively failed.  

I think these are examples of how a more productive discussion could be developed in order to gauge the limitations, successes, and defeats of a country of the global South that was wrestling to regain its right to political, economic, and social development.

Q.3 Libya鈥檚 exemplary record in providing free health and education services are now an important reference point of its move towards domestic welfarism. How was this achieved and what led to its demise. 

Once again, there is so much confusion when it comes to Libya, even among leftists. Today, there is a plethora of social media posts rallying the achievements of pre-2011 Libya, where鈥攚e are told鈥攈ealth care, education, and all kinds of other social services were provided with little or no costs by the government. Is this true? Yes and no. This is where we must proceed with an historical analysis of the changing material conditions. For instance, in the aftermath of the 1969 revolution, there are no doubts that the government poured millions in establishing a model of economic development that reached out to the most disadvantaged sectors of society. Unless you ask someone descending from a family of wealthy landowners whose properties were confiscated and redistributed, the economic policies pursued by the government were of a truly progressive nature.  By the mid颅-1980s, these policies boosted economic development in Libya and raised the general standard of living. The rate of infant mortality witnessed a massive reduction, the average intake of calories per day was the highest among the members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting countries, and life expectancy had increased from fifty-five to sixty-four years old over the course of eleven years. The government had fulfilled many of its promises, transforming slums and unhealthy dwellings into modern tenements, building a wide range of infrastructure and construction projects, such as an artificial river, transport and communication networks, and providing free healthcare and education. These policies translated into a large consensus around and support for a model of political and economic development that challenged the idea of a state-centric and market-oriented world political system.

If you fast-forward the status of the infrastructural development to the 1990s-early 2000s, the situation has changed drastically. From the increasing stealing of public money by private actors to an UN-imposed decade of international isolation, the services provided by the government were not of the same quality. As I trace in the book, Libya never ever reached the levels of poverty and disenfranchisement that Tunisians or Egyptians were experiencing by 2011, yet Libyans were nonetheless dissatisfied because they aspired to see Libya become like Dubai, not Egypt.

Q.4. The book makes an interesting link between US- led sanctions on Libya and the deepening of unequal exchange relations under dependency theory. Can you explain this?

Starting with the US-led unilateral sanctions in the 1970s and then becoming UN-led multilateral ones (1992-2003), Libya fell under the grip of sanctions for more than two decades. Now, as much as mainstream academic analyses tell us that sanctions had a minor impact, this is not the case. Take, for instance, the US ban on spare parts related to the aviation industry. This ban imposed major financial costs on the nascent Libyan sector. The US monopoly over the aerospace industry functioned as part of the process of unequal exchange of technology and impeded the healthy development of a service that was vital to Libya鈥檚 economy. That is, Libya was heavily reliant on the import of products and foreign skilled labour. When a country is prevented from harnessing its resources for national and regional developmental goals, then these economic measures aim effectively to keep a relationship of economic dependency. Once again, by the 1990s, this type of technological control could not be exercised by the US anymore, since European states and other countries had broken its monopoly over the aviation sector. However, the UN-imposed multilateral sanctions had different types of consequences. By 1994, just two years into the UN sanctions鈥� regime, as many as nine thousand medical patients had to be treated outside of the country, since Libya was not allowed access to the necessary equipment to treat them. Medical staff reductions, at the same time, had seriously impaired the functioning of the health services, which were strongly dependent on the expertise of foreign doctors. Archival documents from the United Nations reveal the extent of the impact across several industrial sectors, including oil, transportation, and agriculture. Meanwhile, inflation had reached record rates, at 42 percent in 1993, peaking at 50 percent in 1994.

I am now working on a paper that will hopefully be published soon on the nature of sanctions on Libya, and I would argue that sanctions operate as one among many forms of imperialist warfare, which were unleashed to maintain the dominance of US-led imperialism in the Arab region, and the global South at large. In this regard, sanctions remain a fundamental tool of the imperialist 鈥榮ecurity doctrine.鈥�

Q.5 Libya鈥檚 pariah governance model and identity as an Arab as well African state also deserves attention to regional influences. If we pay attention to Gulf States as class states, following Adam Hanieh, Libyan aspirations based on the Dubai model tell us something about the role of empire in forming consumerist construct. What did Dubai mean for Libya and Libyans? Similarly, what did Libya mean for African states?

This is the focus of Chapter 5 in the book, in which I trace the rise of consumerist desires, as well as the fantasy of turning Libya into the Dubai of North Africa. The book shows that these fantasies are a reminder of the rise of the global to the surface of the mundane, specifically the triumph of global capitalism with Gulf characteristics. These fantasies were symptomatic of the gradual defeat of another vision for the future that had initially sought to build an alternative model of development, largely reflecting the sociopolitical context then prevailing in the wider 1970s African and Asian postcolonial resistance. However, this political model not only showed its internal limitations, but also collapsed under the constant threat of war and sanctions by Western geopolitical forces. Consequently, these more progressive policies that had been pursued were abandoned, metamorphosing into more repressive policies and rising socioeconomic inequalities for the Libyan people. In such a context, meaning in the early 2000s, capitalist modernity was being desired, while the contribution of these same Western-led forces to the defeat of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya was being ignored/forgotten.

At the same time, the Dubai model competed with another vision of the future that another segment of the Libyan elite was pursuing, namely the Sirte model. In 1999, an official meeting was hosted in the Libyan city of Sirte to proclaim the establishment of the African Union. I describe the model of Sirte, in other words, as incarnating the aspirations of the regime to turn Libya into a bulwark of African regional development. The Libyan government pursued a foreign policy of diplomatic expansion and economic investment toward the African continent. These policies further hindered normalization with the US in particular, because, for example, Qaddafi lobbied the African Union to reject the presence of the US African Command Army (AFRICOM) on African soil, forcing them to relocate their headquarters to Frankfurt, Germany. The Gulf monarchies, on the contrary, have embraced a progressively normalizing stance towards the Zionist-Israeli occupation of Palestine, encapsulated in the signing of the recent Abraham Accords. Also, Libya sponsored and supported the launch of the first African-owned communication satellite, whose creation put an end to lucrative subcontracts for Western countries. And, as we now know thanks to Wikileaks, Libya was planning the launch of important monetary changes for the African continent. It had, in fact, accumulated 143 tons of gold that were intended to be used to establish a Pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden dinar; the plan was designed to provide the francophone African countries with an alternative to the French franc.

Q.6 Where does Libya stand since 2011?

Libya has become one of the numerous theatres of wars in the region, created by US-led capitalism/imperialism in order to maintain its dominance. In 2011, the country was destroyed by a NATO-led military coalition, largely backed by Gulf countries. Since then, Libya no longer has a national security apparatus that acts independently without foreign meddling, and its major financial portfolios are still subject to international sanctions, which will be presumably lifted鈥攁s the so-called international community repeats鈥攐nce the war ends.

Since the US invasion of Iraq, the Arab world has been the protagonist in a passage from an equilibrium between economic and military imperialism, where the ideology of economic 鈥榞lobalisation鈥� had the upper hand, to a militaristic and technological form of imperialist expansion, where war and pauperisation are pursued, as in Libya and Syria. The war in Libya continues because it is part of a new geopolitical balance, in which鈥攄espite the decline of US hegemony鈥攏o other country is dominating. The corollary for Libya is that its integration into the global economy has also changed. How? Via war, militarism, border missions and death, which have imposed themselves as the new mechanisms of social reproduction and capital accumulation at the global level. In such a scenario, futile are the international actors鈥� calls for an arms embargo and ceasefires. Why? Because wars and their consequences are becoming the new terrain of social reproduction for a US-led imperial capital that struggles to remain alive. As I explore in my recent article, have increasingly become a paradigmatic form of investment opportunity through which the global South is being framed and integrated into the global economy, where armaments, drones and technological infrastructures of surveillance can be tested, perfected and reused at home. Finally, there is another fundamental element to this question, which is directly related to our work as academic. The military-industrial complex in which Libya has fallen also has an academic dimension; that is, since 2011, there is an increasing attempt by so-called security and thinktank experts to occupy the space of knowledge production on Libya. This is not the result of coincidence. This is part of a political economy of war that fosters a certain discourse and in which alternative鈥攁nd more critical鈥攖ypes of analyses are rejected, if not outrightly attacked.

 is a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester in the UK. Her research focuses on comparative development, Industrial policy, corporations, economic geography and the changing landscape of development assistance. She tweets at .